Eastern Cleveland, 1990s. My school was in a very bad neighborhood, but there was about a 500-meter bubble of safety surrounding the school. If local toughs ever tried to commit any violence in that bubble, it was a mistake they made only once.
Inside the school itself, there were whispered rumors of what the penalty for fighting was, but they were only rumors, because no fight had ever occurred in the school within living memory. And nobody dared find out if the rumors were true.
EDIT: Oh, and apropos to the topic of racial tensions, my high school was the most diverse I’ve ever seen, in every way except religion (it being a Catholic school, we were mostly Catholic).
I grew up in northeast Baltimore in a neighborhood where drugs and fights and juvenile crime were fairly common. I went to high school in another world, a Jesuit all-boys prep school in a well-to-do suburb. I was definitely safer at my high school than I was in my neighborhood.
Middle-class neighborhood in Northern Ohio. Our team’s mascot was the “Black Tigers”, which was funny because we were so lily-white we had the nick name of “Cuya-honkey”. About 2,700 students in three grades (my graduating class had 905 members).
Can’t remember any fights (that was more a Jr. High thing) and with that many students it was relatively easy to avoid bullying, so no real problems, only time I remember things out of control was when we got sent home due to a teacher’s strike and some students got into the cafeteria and started breaking dishes, glasses, etc., in the school halls, but that was about it.
I went to school in the 90s in Toronto and it wasn’t dangerous at the time. It had about 1500 students, had a gifted program, and was next door to several large apartment buildings with a large Tamil immigrant population. Beyond the occasional bullying and fistfight, no violence.
There was a threat called in once, though it was a hoax.
Literally the year after I left there was a gang kidnapping on the front lawn. Since I’ve left I haven’t kept up, it may have stayed the same or gotten worse.
Public all academic all boys (not any more!) HS in Philadelphia of about 1800 students. Perfectly safe and, in the early 50s, I don’t think there were any drugs.
It had a reputation as the “bad” school allegedly due to a few gun incidents in which no one was hurt, but in reality it was the high school closest to DC in one of the richest counties in America, i.e. it had all the “ethnic” people, thus it was “bad.” I never once felt unsafe in any way.
The racial makeup of the student body was split exactly evenly between white, black, hispanic, and Asian. For the most part the Asian and hispanic kids, at least the “just off the boat” ones kept to themselves due to limited English skills, but everyone else got along just fine.
Early 90s, northeast PA. Pretty safe; there were a few fistfights and shoving matches but nothing major. Real fights between local gangs went on after hours because half their members went to to a different school.
Only time I ever took a weapon was when I took a squirt pistol as a prop for a sketch in English class.
Western PA suburb, early 70s. There was a considerable amount of recreational drug use, and the occasional one-on one-fight, but no significant violence I can think of, gangs were completely unheard of, and if anyone ever carried weapons, it wasn’t obvious. Really, the biggest risk was being bored to tears.
Rural GA in the late 60’s to early 80’s. Extremely safe. There were fistfights in elementary school as the boys tested each other’s limits, but nothing serious. In middle school there was, in the mid-70’s, a rumor of a “race war” that was going to take place. On the appointed day, absolutely nothing happened.
Wait, there was that time in high school where someone let thousands of crickets loose in the cafeteria. And the time someone put a toilet on top of one of the main breezeways. Scary.
There wasn’t even a thought of any violence happening in my high school in Canada. There was zero violence, apart from the odd school yard scuffle between two males, like once a year.
1976-1980
There were no knives. There were no guns.
In fact there were no races. I think there were two Korean kids in the school at one point.
Yeah. Less black on white specifically, but still a lot of violence breaking down along racial lines. Hispanic on Armenian was actually the largest issue in my school.
I was going to say “pretty safe” but we did have our occasional incidents. I remember one time walking through one of our hallway - all three of the hallways merged into a central foyer, which had an upstairs and a downstairs, and I was heading for this - and hearing a large BOOOM! which made us all duck and flinch.
Turned out some dipshit asshole kids who probably are out breaking into cars right now had lit and thrown an M-80, or as it’s known amongst normal people, a quarter stick of dynamite, from the top floor to the bottom floor, amongst people. Several people were injured and one girl lost her hearing permanently in one ear.
I also remember there was a serial molester in our school. Oh, he claimed to be “goosing” the girls, but in my lexicon, goosing does not mean reaching between the legs and grabbing the vulva. It was very much an atmosphere of “boys will be boys” though. :rolleyes:
My middle school was way worse, the older black girls regularly beat up the younger non-black girls.
This, except most kids in my South Arkansas high school were middle class. We had one race riot that lasted less than an hour. Few of the participants got hit by glass coke bottles and went to the ER. I doubt there were 30 actually involved in the riot total. The rest of us stayed in our classrooms and out of trouble.
Working-class neighborhood in southeast LA county, late 80s, mostly Latino except for a few kids from other ethnic groups. There were some fights, but nothing involving weapons that I can remember. There were gang members, but any gang-related violence remained off-campus, at least while I was there. The campus was not fenced in when I started at that school, but sometime in ‘87 or so a chain-link fence was installed to cut down on kids ditching class. It didn’t work. By the time my younger siblings went there, in the early 90s, truancy had increased to the point that some kids had “ditching parties” at their houses while their parents were at work. One of my sisters was beaten up by some girls in the bathroom for talking to a boy one of them liked; I think they all got suspended and sis went to another school for about a year. Also, a girl in my sisters’ graduating class was shot by accident in the nearby neighborhood and lived for a few more years as a quadriplegic. Oh yeah, my sister’s friend’s boyfriend was shot and killed for being from the wrong neighborhood.
Very safe school for the most part, Catholic, boys only, Yr4 -Yr12. At most there would be one or two minor fist-fights a year which lasted about a minute each.
A few of the teachers were far more of a threat to the students than the students themselves.
Suburban Green Bay, Wisconsin, 1979-1983; I attended a smallish (300 students over 4 grades), Catholic, all-male school. You could count on one hand the number of fights in a school year, and even those were of the “a couple of guys shoving each other, and maybe throwing a punch” variety. Even the thought of actual violence in the school would have been a foreign concept to us.
FWIW, in that era, Green Bay was 99+% white, too. We had three or four Asian kids in my school – although Green Bay had welcomed a significant number of Hmong refugees in the mid '70s, none of them wound up at my school. And, we had a grand total of two black kids in the school – one of them had been adopted by a white family, and the other was the son of a retired Packer player, who had stayed in the area.
mid-to-late 90s. Middle to Upper middle class area.
Lots of drug use, and teen pregnancy (highest in the nation at one point, and enough that we had a daycare at the school). The occasional fights and brawls, but the thing that stands out is that we had a student hold a class hostage at gun-point for a few hours. This was before Columbine, so I don’t remember it being more than local news.
