Word: webster
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Middle-class blacks who live in Webster Groves and have strong role models tend to score higher--but can still feel isolated. By third period, senior Paya Rhodes, 18, is in her advanced-calculus class, sitting beside the only other black student. Rhodes has a 3.6 GPA, and in most of her advanced classes, she's the only black. Paya used to take pride in that status and in her family's record of excellence at Webster Groves. Her oldest brother maintained a 4.0 for four straight years; another went on to Washington University. Her mother and a third brother...
Even Sally Roth, whose best friend is black, admits that amid Webster's relative racial harmony, there are unsettling contradictions, which she experienced first-hand while dating a black guy at school. When she would visit her boyfriend at his home, some of the "popular white kids" at school would "make these rude comments about me going to Little Africa, Hershey Hill or Browntown. They were his friends too. It really pissed me off that they would say that behind his back." When Sally's black friends came to visit, new neighbors blamed them, without evidence, for a recent burglary...
...many as 20% of Leigh's Webster Groves classmates currently take prescription medication to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders, according to the school's social worker, Pat Ferrugia. Nationally, an estimated 1 in 20 children and adolescents suffers from depression. While doctors have long dispensed drugs like Ritalin to children and adolescents, teen prescriptions for antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil have grown rapidly in recent years...
Accordingly, schools minister more and more to the mental health of their student bodies. At Webster Groves each student is assigned to one of the school's six guidance counselors, who keeps tabs on them for all four years. But it's those closest to students--teachers, coaches and even peers--who serve as the primary mental-health detectors. Teachers receive a checklist of the signs of adolescent depression, ranging from "lack of concentration" to "crying spells" all the way to "thoughts or plans of suicide." If a student matches the profile, teachers alert a 16-member team...
...teeth, teens emerge from cars packed four to a seat, flirting and yelling, heading for the back of senior Katie Sonderman's tidy white house on Greeley Avenue. Within half an hour, the 24-ft. by 26-ft. Sonderman family room contains--just barely--about one-ninth of the Webster Groves High School student body. Suddenly an overhead projector flips on, two amplified acoustic guitars chime in and 160 youthful voices scream, "Here's a story! It's sad but true! About a girl that I once knew!... Keep away from Runaround...