Team Corruption - Advice Urgently Needed

[JamesCH95]

You do not deserve to be treated so horribly, but it will continue as long as you allow it to happen. There are two options I see at the moment:

(1) If you are officially affiliated with a school system there are likely options you may pursue with regards to bullying, harassment, and discrimination. This will (painfully) excise some of the offending parties from your team and hopefully reduce nepotism. However, it will not correct the underlying attitude issue unless all offending people are removed and/or have a serious attitude adjustment.

(2) Split off and start your own team. It sounds drastic, but the environment you describe is unprofessional, frustrating, degrading, disrespectful, and generally unacceptable. If a new team is started you have the opportunity to recruit students and mentors who share a cohesive vision and attitude and you can establish protocols that eliminate or reduce nepotism.

Honestly, in your position, I would go with #2. A clean slate is the easiest way to form the team that you want with the ideal you wish to represent. It will likely be easy to convince those not in the inner circle to leave, while it will be VERY difficult to remove those already in the inner circle. It will be hard work, but it is possible, and probably the healthiest thing for you to do. My greatest fear would be that there would always be remnants of nepotism unless you split into two teams.