Columbine
Being in high school at the time of the Columbine shootings was interesting in that I got to see the before and after effects first hand. During my Freshman year the security was so lax you could literally light up joints a few yards from the building with nary a concern. My Senior year school resembled a police state similar to Orwell's "1984" which we were reading in English class. Looking back, it was as if every Principal overreacted like Bush did after 9/11, implementing "security policies" that didn't make anyone safer.
Almost overnight there were metal detectors, random locker searches with drug dogs, cameras covering every inch of terrain and armed police officers stationed in the lunch room. Stasi-like hallmonitors demanded to see your papers--in this case, the wooden block labeled "Boys" that permitted you to go pee pee. The most pointless and frustrating policy at the time were the ID tags we were forced to wear. Every student had to wear a lanyard around his or her neck with an ID tag on it. Even in a classroom, where a teacher could be reasonably sure you were in fact the same person you were yesterday, the lanyard had to be on at all times or you would be written up. I really cannot stress how strict they were about this policy.
We wondered what purpose the ID tags served, seeing as how students walking through the front door with guns blazing would probably not be subject to scrutiny on the matter.
Almost overnight there were metal detectors, random locker searches with drug dogs, cameras covering every inch of terrain and armed police officers stationed in the lunch room. Stasi-like hallmonitors demanded to see your papers--in this case, the wooden block labeled "Boys" that permitted you to go pee pee. The most pointless and frustrating policy at the time were the ID tags we were forced to wear. Every student had to wear a lanyard around his or her neck with an ID tag on it. Even in a classroom, where a teacher could be reasonably sure you were in fact the same person you were yesterday, the lanyard had to be on at all times or you would be written up. I really cannot stress how strict they were about this policy.
We wondered what purpose the ID tags served, seeing as how students walking through the front door with guns blazing would probably not be subject to scrutiny on the matter.
posted by Matt Bors at
12:54 AM
9 Comments:
I graduated that year - my friend's ex used Columbine to try and exclude him from graduation. Classy.
The ID badges were more to get you used to showing ID for what are actually basic rights, i.e. voting.
I think I was a Junior that year. We didn't go as insane as security badges, but they did start locking all the outside doors and refusing to let people go behind the building to get to class.
We never had the metal detectors or required transparent backpacks, but the teachers did go through a bunch of training. There was a codeword, "lockdown," if heard on the intercom meant all teachers were to lock their classroom doors.
Also back then, I use to wear trench coats. I had both a gray and a black one. I kept wearing them. No one said anything since I had worn them before the fact, but it sounds like at your school it would have been banned.
ah, yes. The dreaded trench coats. I think The Matrix came out this time as well, which led to more uproar.
The trenchcoat thing was huge in the late 90s. We had a few of those guys, but they generally were just clowns with bad haircuts who hung out on libertarian message boards.
I was probably getting my first prescription of Propecia when Columbine happened. When I was in high school all the real badasses wore three button golf shirts. I got a shark skin raincoat from Goodwill when I was at Ann Arbor Huron high school and my sister thought I was so weird she never talked to me on a real level again. I've often thought about all the comics and stories my friends and I came up with and how we'd be expelled over and over for them today. There was a print shop at my the high school that was always short on content to put on their presses. So they'd take any scary anti-social stuff we'd produce, burn plates, and print thousands of copies. And, kids, there was no AIDS yet either.
The ID tags were to use up the last of the security budget, so they wouldn't have to waste it on anything frivolous like establishing a "no harassment" policy, or incorporating a humanities unit on "respect" into the mandatory curriculum.
I was in high school too; a junior. My school didn't change a lot of its policies noticeably after this.
Oh I meant to ask you Matt, where did you go to high school? Like, what town/state?
Mckinley in Canton, OH
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