A Big Story--Seen Through a Microscope

By Barrett Seaman, Special Projects Editor

As a rule, high schools don't make national news unless something terrible has happened, as was unfortunately the case last spring at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. For this week's 35-page special report, however, TIME chose Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Mo., in part because it has not been benighted by violence.

In fact, we were attracted to the school because it was...well, remarkably average. Curiously enough, given its serene and unnewsworthy nature, Webster Groves has been the subject of inordinate national attention over the years--happily so in 1996, when President Clinton came to honor the school's antidrug efforts, less happily in 1965, when a CBS News team, led by producer Arthur Barron and renowned correspondent Charles Kuralt, arrived to film Sixteen in Webster Groves, a one-hour documentary about the town and its high school-age adolescents.

When the show aired in February 1966, the community recoiled at its nationally televised image. The qualities residents cherished most had been turned against them: safety and security became insularity and complacency, their sense of propriety came off as snobbery, their prosperity as materialism. People were livid, and some still are. Chicago correspondent Stacy Perman tracked down several who were there during the filming. Most recall the program as "a hatchet job" but concede that it had its points. "Looking back," says Doug Wheeler, class of '67 and now an emergency-room doctor in Jefferson City, Mo., "there was more truth to it than we wanted to admit at the time."

Webster Groves' lasting bitterness made it all the more surprising that school administrators would even consider allowing our team of eight reporters, under the command of assistant managing editor Dan Goodgame, and five photographers, guided by deputy picture editor Hillary Raskin, to invade their world. They were in part impressed with last year's award-winning special issue, "A Week in the Life of a Hospital," about the Duke University Medical Center, which we told them would be a model for this project. But they were also persuaded by our regional ambassador, team member and Midwest bureau chief Ron Stodghill, whose father is superintendent of another suburban St. Louis school district. "Having grown up in a family of public school educators," says Stodghill, "I've seen firsthand the dedication and hard work of these people under fairly trying circumstances."

Once having opened their school to us, principal Pat Voss, superintendent Bill Gussner and their staffs were not only candid but encouraged others to be so too. They were understandably protective of their adolescent charges, but as it turned out, so were we. Atlanta correspondent Tim Roche, a veteran of school-violence stories in Conyers, Ga., and Pearl, Miss., was once again struck by how unguarded kids can be. Like the rest of us, he found himself "often protecting them from themselves" as he sifted through his notes.

Penetrating the Byzantine world of high school requires a certain degree of tradecraft. Photographers Bob Sacha and Andre Lambertson, both veterans of the Duke campaign, showed their expertise at maneuvering in a complex social group. Religion writer David Van Biema, as he had at Duke, concentrated on the sensitive issues of death and faith. Photographers Joe McNally, Lauren Greenfield and Steve Liss managed to place themselves in the midst of teenage action most outsiders never get to see.

The closest we came to subterfuge was in putting three of our youngest staff members, reporters Andrew Goldstein and Flora Tartakovsky and writer-reporter Jodie Morse, on the project. Goldstein, a recent arrival at TIME, brought to the assignment three years of teaching at a private high school in New Jersey. There are still kids at Webster Groves who think, wrongly, that Morse and Tartakovsky were posing as students. To be sure, Tartakovsky, a graduate of New York City's Bronx High School of Science and of Harvard, class of '98, could pass for a high school senior, but at no time did she try to hide her identity.

Beyond tradecraft, there is the larger question of why we would want to concentrate on just one school. "Sometimes, in order to tell a really big story," answers senior editor and key team member Nancy Gibbs, "we've found that it's best to look at it in miniature--in this case to spend a lot of time in one school and try to figure out what pressures it faces, what is working, what isn't and what has really changed since last spring, when we all discovered how complicated high schools can be." Allowed to peel back the layers of Webster Groves, TIME's team was able to show how remarkable high school really is.

Barrett Seaman, Special Projects Editor