Remember the musical Bye Bye Birdie, about the rock and roll singer who turns fictitious Sweet Apple, Ohio, upside down? In it, beleaguered father Harry MacAfee has it right when he declares in a song:
Kids!
I don't know what's wrong with these kids today!
Kids!
Who can understand anything they say?
And then:
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
But they still just do what they want to do!
Read any psychology text on adolescence and you'll understand that the job of kids is to break away, try on new personas, and discover their identity. In short: rebel.
A few months ago, our school security system bleated out an evacuation tone. I found myself outside in the rain with no coat, no umbrella, and frizzy hair - with 1,500 students and staff to keep me company. As police and bomb-sniffing dogs swarmed the high school, we trudged across the street to the safety of another of our school district's buildings.
If the bomb threat was an act of typical teenage rebellion, I failed to find humor in it - not in today's world. Back in the day, when bomb threats were phoned in, we hit the bleachers and hung out with friends. Today, we don't have the option of ignoring potential danger. Not after the Oklahoma City bombing. Not after the violence in the Philadelphia schools. Not after the heartbreak of Virginia Tech.
For us, within a few hours of the evacuation, hundreds of parents descended on our safe house. They wanted to take home their kids, their neighbors' kids, their nieces and nephews.
Bad move, folks.
The students needed to sit there in the confines of the borrowed auditorium and gymnasium with nothing to do. They needed to stand in line for the bathroom. They needed to suffer through a hastily fashioned brown-bag lunch instead of enjoying their usual a la carte line options.
They needed to be inconvenienced so that every kid got tired of sitting around, or got mad that they'd missed math, or English, or art. So that the event didn't repeat itself. Because even with a police officer and a parole officer on staff, even with video cameras in the halls, even with dedicated teachers and administrators and the best superintendent in the state, we need every student on our side.
But that's not what happened.
