Hey superintendent, walkout isn’t as disruptive as a shooting
“A disruption of school will not be tolerated,” wrote Needville Independent School District Superintendent Curtis Rhodes, in a letter sent to many Fort Bend families last week.
In the aftermath of America’s latest mass shooting, high school students across the country are considering a walkout as a protest against gun violence in schools. And so, Rhodes explained, he was warning families in the district: Any child who walks out of Needville ISD schools will be suspended for three days, even if a parent gives them a note. That strikes me as a disproportionate punishment, given the context. And I’m reluctant to tell any of today’s high school students what I would do if I were their age and enrolled in a school with a superintendent like this one.
But I know how I would have felt in this situation. One of the vice principals at my high school was like Rhodes, in the sense that he didn’t want students to express certain opinions, although he could stop us from doing so only in certain contexts.
“Well, next time, try to use better judgment,” the vice principal said, after I defended my decision to write a story for the local newspaper about the school’s decision to suspend several members of the girl’s basketball team.
“OK,” I said, because I didn’t want to antagonize the agents of the state more than necessary.
But now, I am an adult, and vice principals have no power over me. Neither do superintendents. And I would encourage Rhodes to consider the possibility that if a walkout counts as “a disruption of school,” the same might be said of a three-day suspension.
Beyond that, I think we can all agree that a walkout is not as disruptive to the school environment as a shooting spree.
And it’s worth remembering that the students who are protes-
ting right now weren’t even born when we, as Americans, learned about the massacre at Columbine.
That was on April 20, 1999. I was a senior in high school, and I remember exactly what I was doing that day: I was playing hooky.
I can’t remember why I decided to be truant that day, or why I had the television on in the background, or what I was doing before I got distracted by a breaking news alert about a crisis unfolding at a high school in Littleton, Colo.
But for the rest of the afternoon, I was glued to the television. And I remember being confused and horrified. Columbine students were being shot, but none of the anchors knew who was shooting them, and the siege in Colorado dragged on for a long time.
Wasn’t a prank
I knew that in theory, at least, a school might be the target of an attack. That’s why we had bomb drills when I was a student at an elementary school run by the Department of Defense.
Still, I didn’t know what a school shooting was. Neither did the students at Columbine. As some survivors explained, they initially thought this was some kind of senior prank.
They quickly realized it was not. So did the local law enforcement officers who confronted the killers, just minutes after the first student got shot.
But most Americans had no idea what was happening at Columbine until after the fact. Some of the anchors that afternoon were speculating that it might be domestic terrorism, like the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.
Eventually, we learned that the Columbine shooters were Columbine students, and that the Oklahoma City bombing had been among their inspirations. They had brought bombs to school that day, too, but didn’t have a chance to detonate any of them before the cops confronted them.
The killers retreated to the library where 52 fellow students were trying to hide. The killers had enough ammunition to shoot all of them. But they got bored, apparently, and killed themselves.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. I remember their names because in after the massacre, adults spent a lot of time talking about them — and the fact that they wore black trench coats, and listened to Marilyn Manson, and so on.
That puzzled me, too, at the time, because I was also a high school senior and knew that such details were meaningless. Some of my classmates liked Marilyn Manson. Many of us had seen “The Matrix,” which came out that year, over spring break. I myself had occasionally used a Sharpie to paint my nails black, because I thought black nail polish looked cool but couldn’t find it at the mall or on the internet. Why they protest
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, by contrast, killed 13 people. That’s why they were unusual. And they weren’t even original, really. They just decided to stage their killing spree at a school, in a country with polarized political debates that play out in national mass media.
In retrospect, the Class of 1999 was naive about certain things. Today’s high school students can’t afford to be. That’s why they’re protesting, even if it displeases their elders, who collectively decided some things are worth dying for, if you’re not the one dying.