Word: school
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 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...
...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...
...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...
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...