A Week In The Life Of A High School

By NANCY GIBBS

Everyone has a story from high school, sketched out of memory and myth. The myth reflects the faith that we all have a chance to invent ourselves, and high school is the lab. We enter, still children, for this sweaty, four-year experiment, and if we are brave and lucky, we race out the big double doors that graduation flings open onto the rest of our life. Sometimes we don't even think to look back at the ones who got lost along the way.

The stakes are so high, the experience so searing that in retrospect we sometimes polish it up. These are the best of times; you'll remember your prom as long as you live. Tuesday pep rallies for Friday football games; band practice and the fall musical, Young Life and the Key Club and the astronomy class that met at midnight to watch the cradle moon rise. Even the pain looks poetic from a distance.

The vast majority of our kids, the ones we love and never read about, make it through high school intact, without incident. They do the reading and sing in the choir and bag groceries after school and buy the class T shirt and don't pierce anything below their ears. And yet everything that happens to them is huge. Everybody matters: the teacher who hoists students' ambitions up to meet their potential, or the one who just ignores whatever they say until they stop saying anything; the nurse who takes students into her home to keep them from falling apart; the classmate who teaches loyalty; the coach who instills some discipline. Sometimes the lessons inside the classroom are the least of it.

Look inside a high school, and you are looking in a mirror, under bright lights. How we treat our children, what they see and learn from us, tell us what is healthy and what is sick--and more about who we are than we may want to know. Dylan Klebold lives here, and so does Cassie Bernall, and they can't help showing us what's on their mind, because that's the nature of teenagers. So come in only if you want to learn. All they will give us is a glimpse, but even that may knock the wind out of us.

It is easy to understand, even before Columbine but certainly since, why the adults in a high school could conclude that their most important job was less to teach kids than just to keep them safe, hold their hands, feed them, shape them, show them right from wrong. In loco parentis is just the beginning. In loco all the rest of us as well. Politicians and reformers can talk all they want about standards and vouchers and academic performance, but the people on the front lines worry about a lot more than test scores.

"This place is like a town," says English teacher Minnie Phillips. "We have a jail, a hospital, a restaurant, a theater. We've got everything you need here...but everyone goes home at night." And with luck, comes back the next morning.

"This place" is Webster Groves High School, which sits off the main street of a pretty town of old elms and deep porches, about 10 miles southwest of St. Louis, Mo., where, when people ask you where you went to school, they are not referring to college. That's just the way it is here; high school tugs hard and holds on; people graduate and come back and send their kids, who graduate and do the same. This town of 23,000 is not as tony as nearby Clayton or Ladue; it has its mix of $90,000 cottages and $750,000 homes, young marrieds and old-line families and transient middle managers assigned to a stint in the St. Louis office who are looking for a comfortable place to settle and keep their kids on the track toward prosperity.

And yet this school, like every other school, is changing fast, by accident and design, because everything that touches it is changing too--the economy, family life, technology, race relations, values, expectations. TIME picked this school for the same reason marketing experts and sociologists like to wander this way when they are looking to take the country's temperature: the state of Missouri, especially the regions around St. Louis, are bellwether communities, not cutting edge, not lagging indicators, but the middle of the country, middle of the road, middle of the sky.

To study a school like this is to take an advanced course in compromise. Is it worth renouncing homework and offering credit for rock climbing if it keeps struggling kids in school and out of trouble, massages them through to graduation, maybe even a junior college? Is it worth letting kids work 30 hours a week after school, even if grades suffer and half a dozen are asleep in many a first-period class, in the belief that this is training for the "real world"? Is it worth busing 161 black kids in from St Louis, in a program that provides the school district where they go an extra $2 million in state aid, if parents and some teachers quietly argue that because of busing, overall achievement has fallen? Is it worth turning the principal and her deputies into sentries, equipped at all times not with books or rulers but with walkie-talkies, if it keeps the lid from blowing off?

After Columbine, West Paducah and Conyers, some schools have turned into citadels, metal detectors at the doors, mesh backpacks required. Not Webster. The doors are open at dawn and left unguarded; 96% of the kids polled this fall by the student newspaper say they feel safe in school. They say the kids get along pretty well, races mix, jocks and geeks hang out together. And yet they will say, if you ask, "Littleton could happen here." Last spring, after Columbine, someone scrawled a bomb threat on the wall of a boys' bathroom. The marginal kids know they are being watched, very, very closely.

If there is a secret to running a school in post-Columbine America, it is to make sure the place keeps no secrets from you. Since schools are populated by adolescents--that eager, suspicious, alienated, hyperbolic cohort--this alone is a full-time job. "There are two directions that schools are going in: to improve the climate and build trust, or to have metal detectors and transparent lockers," says assistant principal John Raimondo.

Webster Groves has made a conscious decision to try to control the weather. The school would much rather prevent a disaster than clean up after one--which means that a child who so much as murmurs a threat toward himself or a teacher or another student is immediately under the microscope. But still the tempests come. "Drinking is the biggest problem," says police captain Doug Jacobs, class of '59, "and the parents that allow it." A child from a prominent family has a beer-and-booze party in the backyard while Mom and Dad are not home. There is the boy who dived into drugs and death threats and knives last year after his good friend died, the boy's soft, slashed wrist a souvenir of his journey through grief. He keeps in his planner the business cards of the hospitals that have treated him.

Teachers, like parents, have always faced the tension between roots and wings: how to keep kids safe and grounded; how to let them stretch and fly. But after so many shocking headlines, the adults are edgy and tempted to try to stamp out teenage rebellion and cruelty and popularity contests altogether. At a Webster pep rally, for the first time, individual team members are no longer introduced by name--to keep the cheering and booing from getting personal. Cheerleaders are picked by a panel of outside professionals, the football team rotates its captains so no one is favored, and anyone can show up for the Student Council meetings. Some students don't know who the senior-class president is. Adults "don't want to offend certain groups," says senior Lizzie Sprague, 17. "They are afraid [students] are going to go buy guns and kill everybody."

So if you aren't allowed to wear a hat, toot your horn, form a clique or pick on a freshman, all because everyone is worried that someone might snap, it's fair to ask: Are high schools preparing kids for the big ugly world outside those doors--or handicapping them once they get there? High school was once useful as a controlled environment, where it was safe to learn to handle rejection, competition, cruelty, charisma. Now that we've discovered how unsafe a school can be, it may have become so controlled that some lessons will just have to be learned elsewhere.

At times it seems that the faculty is engaged in a giant game of chicken--and some kids have learned to take advantage of it. For many, the extent of their forethought is making plans for the weekend, and even those are subject to change at the last minute. They get jobs, not necessarily to save for college but to buy a $400 leather jacket. So many kids skip their homework that most teachers stop assigning more than 15 minutes' worth: ask too much, push too hard, and the students will give up, drop out, become a menace to society. We have to strike a balance, the adults say. We have to be reasonable. We want them to enjoy themselves, have a certain freedom, before the world turns serious on them and there is no going back to 17.

There is an excellent education lurking here for the child with an inner flashlight. The best teachers arrive early and leave late and wrestle to make everything they teach mean something, and they all show up at the football game at the end of the week, their own kids in tow, cheering their students on and mixing and meddling with their lives in the bleachers. Walk down the halls, stop and listen in, and you can hear those moments of collision and discovery. "Some of you were complaining that the questions I was asking about The Scarlet Letter were making your brains hurt," says David Mendelson to his honors English class. "That is the goal." He is trying to take them to the point where their heads throb, because that is the point at which they learn. "If the question is easy, I have failed." Maybe high school is supposed to hurt some. That is also why we remember what happens here forever--all the triumphs and all the scars, all the effort to tell which is which.