Snitch.

[minsue]

I was a substitute teacher, the last time I was at a high school, but that was before Columbine. Yeah, the Earl, there are often cops and metal detectors at the entrances to high schools in the US, since Columbine.

It's stupid and a waste of money, but that's the scene.

We have none, ANY MORE, at our own local high school. The school board saw it as a limited-time kind of thing. OK, they said, let's do this, but only until it blows over.

It's the Lenny Bruce effect. If town A busts Lenny for obscenity, and town B does it, Town C has to do it, or what kind of shithouse town is town C?

Similarly with the cop in the school, for my hometown. But other places, yes, indeed. There are policemaen, not rent-a-cops, but honest-to-Jesus policemen, in the schools. It is a paranoid society, here. People are afraid of their own children, to a marked and pathological degree. It pains me to acknowledge this, but it is absolutely true, pard.

Cops and metal detectors may have become more prevalent after Columbine, but they were certainly around beforehand. Columbine was after my time, but we had police officers at the high school and junior high. That would've been late eighties and early nineties. As far as I know, they're still there. No metal detectors, though. They would be useless in the schools out here which consist of multiple single level buildings sprawling all over the place.

 

[elsol]

"There are very few things that I can think of that would be more effective at destroying that sense of community," said Bruce Marlowe, an education psychology professor at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.

I'm sure that one kid with a gun can give everyone a 'sense of community'. Tragedy has a way of doing that.

Sincerely,
ElSol