High School Life In 2018

It’s been a weird week at my daughter’s school.

 

Randie is in her senior year and is within a few months of following the advice Garrison Keillor gave her two years ago: get out of high school as fast as you can.

 

Randie has no problem wanting to escape high school but where to escape to, that has been the question.

 

Slowly and in fits and starts, applications have been made for financial aid and reviews of universities have begun. It’s still a bit nebulous, focusing on what her post high school future is going to look like. She knows she wants to be an animator which is good. When I was her age and staring down what life was going to be like after taking leave of high school, I had no clue what I wanted to be. 

 

I still don’t.

 

But whatever the future holds, the present day life of high school is fraught with tension and worry.

 

About a week ago, two white a-hole dudes from her school posted a video online of the two of them ranting the most heinous, racist bulls**t. The video went viral across the country and even internationally.

 

Randie was horrified to discover her school’s name in a headline on the BBC World Service News.  

 

Randie has observed there has always been an undercurrent of racism at her school. Her high school is located in an outlying corner of our county. It is essentially a rural school surrounded by a predominantly white population. 

 

But she has noticed that in the last year or so, that racism has moved from an undercurrent to being more overt. Racist words and actions that used to be kept on the down low in deference to a polite society that abhorred such things are not expressed more openly. Like it’s OK to be racist now.

 

Well, that’s what those two punks in there obscenity filled video seemed to think. But they found out differently when they were suspended from school and may now be the target for investigation for hate crimes. 

 

Tension at school was rising. Around 10:30 Tuesday night, Randie told me that there was a threat going around, that someone might start shooting. 

 

Someone did a screen grab of a student’s text that seemed quite ominous but a bit vague. Still, it was enough to give one pause that perhaps something sinister was going on.

 

It was enough to make the 11 o’clock news as the lead story. School administrators and law enforcement had been alerted to the message.   

 

Logically, as ominous and threatening as the message sounded, there really wasn’t a lot to go on. Even the time frame of the alleged intended attack was not specific, just that something bad was going to go down “soon”.  Soon as in tomorrow? Next week? “Soon” could mean anything.

 

Randie was a bit distressed. She could clearly understand that as far as threats go, this was not very specific. People have made empty threats before and nothing came of them.

 

But people have died in gun violence in schools. The threat may be empty but the possibility of violence is very real. 

 

I strongly felt that the odds of anything happening as a result of this message were slim. But I didn’t feel 100% comfortable with that assessment. If I told my daughter to go to school and then something happened, I would never forgive myself.

 

But in this day and age, we all live with that risk every day, with or without a specific threat.

 

Randie’s network of friends was reporting parents in a tizzy, determined to not let their children go to school.

 

(You may wonder where my wife Andrea was in all this. It was late, she was asleep and I saw no good coming from waking her up just to upset her. I opted to wait to see what the morning would bring.)

 

The next morning, the story of the threat was still on the news with a reporter named Heidi on the scene with not much to report since it was before the school opened. But Heidi said the sheriff’s department had advised additional officers would be in the campus that day. (“Additional” in that the sheriff’s dept. was already eyeballing the school for any trouble springing out of the tension caused by the super racist video.)

 

Andrea, when informed of the threat, reacted completely as I expected she would: with complete and utter fear, emphatically insisting that Randie should not go to school that day. 

 

I made my case: the threat was vague. It just said “soon”. There was nothing to indicate any action that soon meant that day. What about the next day? And the day after that? And next week? And so on?

 

And there’s going to be a lot of sheriff deputies on the scene.

 

And Heidi’s there! 

 

That day would probably be the safest day at school with law enforcement everywhere and Heidi with her TV camera watching the place. 

 

So Randie went to school and the day was uneventful. Besides the deputies, FBI agents were also on the scene.

 

High school life in 2018. What are you gonna do?