Word: webster
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
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...
...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...
...routinely excluded from almost all policies, it is widely available--on request--and at rates that make a lot of sense. Why don't more people have it? One problem is that they don't understand how insurers define flood. I'll get to that, and, trust me, Webster would choke on the description. An even bigger problem is that insurance agents have little incentive to write flood coverage. Meanwhile, many agents and local officials are so ill informed that they mislead entire communities into believing that flood protection is impossible...
DIED. KATIE WEBSTER, 63, blues pianist and singer who played with Otis Redding; of heart failure; in League City, Texas...