# Paranoia Everywhere in School Systems **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 3, 2000, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016 "2000-08-03T18:36:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![orestes543](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/b5e925/32.png) [@orestes543](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orestes543)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2000, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/1 "2000-08-03T18:36:12Z")
Ok, sorry everyone, but I just have to say this. It has been over a year and three months since Columbine- it’s time to get over the paranoid shit. I’m really tired of seeing these kids in middle and high school being suspended for the stupidest shit imaginable. One school suspended a kid for dying his hair blue, another kid suspended for refusing to take off his trench coat that he had been wearing even before Columbine? And now, adults are accusing kids of conspiracy for staying to themselves and being quiet? I was like that in school ever since seventh grade and even back then, I was accused of some rather trivial crap. Just because my opinion of everyone there leaves a little bit more to be desired, that doesn’t mean that I was going to go in and shoot them all up. Is everything so far gone now that there is no hope left for the school systems? There is a time to be worried but I think that now, we’re just taking it too far. When will enough be enough? Are we ever going to be able to trust the kids ever again? Any thoughts anyone? :mad: ---
**Author:** ![red\_dragon60](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ce73a5/32.png) [@red\_dragon60](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/red_dragon60)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2000, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/2 "2000-08-03T19:30:37Z")
Well, the shootings all happened in suburban, mostly white schools by white males. Me being a white male, smart, and not ultra-popular, have to deal with that all the time. It wears me down. Sometimes I actually feel like going postal just to shut these people up. Paranoia in schools is one of the top 1000 things I hate about being a teen, right up there with preppy rich girls who shoplift. ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2000, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/3 "2000-08-03T19:46:48Z")
Read the[Voices from the Hellmouth](http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml) series on Slashdot. Many of the comments made me cry. This is the price we pay for having an IQ greater than 12. ---
**Author:** ![iampunha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/74df32/32.png) [@iampunha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iampunha)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2000, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/4 "2000-08-03T20:19:05Z")
I am a member of a newsgroup that discusses bullying, and a few months ago an email was directed my way regarding some new system that rewards kids for turning in students who are shy or introverted or sad. There’s a hotline they can call and from what I’ve heard kids who call in are rewarded with gifts. I will try to find the URL for this place. I have to say I got out of high school just in time, as senior year was Columbine and people thought I might go shooting or bombing the place. ---
**Author:** ![\_bobster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/_/49beb7/32.png) [@\_bobster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/_bobster)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2000, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/5 "2000-08-04T00:09:01Z")
all the school paranoia stuff is really irritating- sometimes it’s worth it (there was a middle school around here where some seventh graders were threatening to shoot people or sumthin… supposedly they were really going to do it) and sometimes it’s not. There was a bomb threat at my high school the year after columbine (? maybe it was that year) and we had to waste like two or three hours out on the field while people searched all the classrooms and the lockers, and there was a bomb threat at another high school around here exactly one year after Columbine. Of course nothing happened in either one- i hate how a couple bad kids give everyone else our age a bad reputation. ~_nora_~ ---
**Author:** ![Myrr21](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Myrr21](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Myrr21)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2000, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/6 "2000-08-04T00:14:48Z")
My former high school–the public school with the most sense of community and acceptance in the county–recently got voted by the local TV station “the most likely Baltimore Co school for a school-shooting Columbine style”. Why? Because we have lots of freaks. You know why we have lots of freaks? Because they’re accepted at the school, and not harassed. Those SOBs at the TV station got more than one truly pissed off letter. ---
**Author:** ![Garfield226](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Garfield226](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Garfield226)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2000, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/7 "2000-08-04T00:14:48Z")
Sheesh! Iam, I have it at my school! It’s in affiliation with crimestoppers. Supposedly anonymous phoneline. If the student (who was reported) is disciplined then the “case” goes to a board of students. They decide, based on the crime or whatever, how much MONEY to give the person who called it in. The person is given a number to keep it anonymous, supposedly. I was opposed to it from the very beginning. They give people MONEY for turning in other people. I have my predictions that it will be pranked. Many, many times. Not by me. No. Seriously, the above comments COULD probably get me suspended (threatening to prank the phoneline). It’s sad, really. ---
**Author:** ![iampunha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/74df32/32.png) [@iampunha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iampunha)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2000, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/8 "2000-08-04T00:42:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Garfield226 \* > **Sheesh! Iam, I have it at my school!** Yup, that’s what I’m talking about. If this isn’t an attempt to mainstream everyone, I truly don’t know what is . . . people are allowed to be different, folks! It’s even . . . _gasp_ healthy! We thrive on it if we’re not close-minded bastards! Gosh . . . think about it. Someone who wants to be left alone. Yup. There must be something wrong with that. :wally ---
**Author:** ![tiggeril](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tiggeril/32/7234_2.png) [@tiggeril](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tiggeril)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2000, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/9 "2000-08-04T01:10:11Z")
I am so glad I went to private school. A small private school where all us freaks could join together in our communal freakiness. Hell… even our teachers were freaks and rejects when they were in high school. I don’t know what I’m going to do at college. ---
**Author:** ![Feynn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ecb155/32.png) [@Feynn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Feynn)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2000, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/10 "2000-08-04T14:39:17Z")
When there are police and metal detectors in schools I suspect there is a problem. We send our kids to a private Christian school although Lola and I are Agnostics. They get the highest level of instruction and get to learn in a safe environment. The school only teaches to the ninth grade so after that they will go to a boarding school a little ways from here. We won’t be putting them into a big city high school with 1500 students that’s for sure. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 2:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/11 "2000-08-05T02:18:57Z")
This is something I wrote. Hope you like it. > [@](#): > > COLUMBINE HIGH MASSACRE. The sudden and violent deconstruction of the abstraction linking learning and high schools. > > Immediately after the massacre, a plethora of talking heads stood up and expressed shock and bewilderment over how such a thing could happen in a high school, where students always used to feel safe. These persons were apparently never kids themselves, or else they were the popular ones. > > High school is a conformity-breeding machine. Through official sanction and unofficial teenage terrorism and ostracism, those who are different in even the most trivial of ways are punished by being systematically driven insane. > > Jon Katz said it on [Slashdot.org](http://Slashdot.org) (“The Magazine for Nerds”) on April 26, 1999: > > > [@](#): > > > > The big story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages or the TV talk shows. It wasn’t whether the Net is a place for hate-mongers and bomb-makers, or whether video games are turning your kids into killers. It was the spotlight the Littleton, Colorado killings has put on the fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high school is a Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and rage. …Pop culture has been trying to get this message out for years. For many kids - often the best and brightest – school is a nightmare. People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky ones are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated, sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially. Odd values - unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are exalted, while the best values - free thinking, non-conformity, curiosity - are ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the Trenchcoat Mafia left was to ensure that this message got heard, by a society that seems desperate not to hear it. > > So what we have, then, is a place where intelligence, individuality, and freedom of thought are systematically and brutally suppressed with or without official complicity. In other words, secondary educational institutions are facilities for the deletion of the very faculties which are necessary for becoming educated. The notion that any learning of any value could take place in such a guerilla state is contrary to three thousand years of intellectual tradition, absurd, pathetic, and everywhere. > > The response to the Columbine massacre was immediate and universal. Nonconformist students everywhere immediately realized what the real motivations of the killers were; not Hollywood or Marilyn Manson, but the end result of constant psychic torture for unashamed difference. School authorities throughout the United States, for their part, took decisive action to prevent future massacres by banning black trench coats. ---
**Author:** ![Myrr21](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Myrr21](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Myrr21)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/12 "2000-08-05T03:41:00Z")
See, that’s the thing–public schools don’t have to be like this. I know–I went to a public school that was the exception. I received a first-rate education in a safe, accepting community, completely for free and without religious affiliation or whatnot. There were a few other good high schools around too…arrghhh! It makes me want to smack these people around some and say, “fix your damn school system, and you won’t have these sorts of problems”… ---
**Author:** ![Sneevil](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/41988e/32.png) [@Sneevil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sneevil)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/13 "2000-08-05T03:59:42Z")
> [@](#): > > When will enough be enough? When Bush/Cheney are in the White House and a Republican majority holds both houses of Congress… Well, it will probable take more than that, but still a step in the RIGHT direction. ---
**Author:** ![FreakFreely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/48db29/32.png) [@FreakFreely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FreakFreely)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/14 "2000-08-05T04:21:09Z")
Say what? I’d like to be the first one (in this thread at least) to say you’re full of shit. How would that be a step in the right direction? ---
**Author:** ![nashiitashii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7c8e57/32.png) [@nashiitashii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nashiitashii)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/15 "2000-08-05T04:23:30Z")
People in high school that are popular don’t embrace individuality, and most of them are sheep herded by the pop culture out there. I’m considered odd by most of the people I go to school with, but for some reason I end up getting more “followers” than people who will ridicule me for anything I do. I guess it’s the personality I have. [Some describe me as charismatic in personality.] Watching closely those who don’t fit in will make them more likely to do something stupid. It’s silly that they think the ones who aren’t sheep will do something and that sheep won’t. Wake up, anyone can do something like Columbine, but most of us won’t. Don’t police people who aren’t making problems or threats. ---
**Author:** ![FreakFreely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/48db29/32.png) [@FreakFreely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FreakFreely)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/16 "2000-08-05T04:24:37Z")
I mean, aside from being a step in the right wing direction. ---
**Author:** ![Byzantine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/dfb087/32.png) [@Byzantine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Byzantine)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/17 "2000-08-05T04:28:20Z")
Freak, honey, he/she/that thing is trolling again… Don’t fall down the troll hole. ---
**Author:** ![FreakFreely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/48db29/32.png) [@FreakFreely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FreakFreely)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/18 "2000-08-05T04:36:19Z")
Nah, I was just thinking I’d chuck a flame into the hole and smoke him out. No wait, then he’d be back up here again… nevermind, you’re right. And not in the same way he’s right. ---
**Author:** ![Yue\_Han](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/eada6e/32.png) [@Yue\_Han](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yue_Han)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 5:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/19 "2000-08-05T05:10:23Z")
Tales from the trenches: A guy who goes to my school came here because he got expelled from his home school. Here’s how it went down: PreColombine, Darryl was one of 4 students in his school to wear a black trench coat. He was the ONLY black student, and the ONLY underclassman, to do so. PostColombine, he wisely left the coat at home. Unfortunately, the principal remembered he had one. He was expelled the first day back to school after the shootings. Apparently, they decided that out of their school’s “trenchcoat mafia” of 4, the black siphomore was the most dangerous. –John ---
**Author:** ![SanibelMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e4f/32.png) [@SanibelMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SanibelMan)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2000, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016/20 "2000-08-05T08:22:39Z")
I go to a school where I don’t have to worry about metal detectors or locker searches or guards or dogs. I get my education in safe classrooms, often with about 15 kids per classroom. I can come to my teachers and administrators with problems, and they not only know who the hell I am, they are able to help me. I am not a face in a sea of students - there are less than 200 students in my entire high school, grades 9-12. I am not traumatized, I am not reviled. I don’t have many friends, but I have some, and the rest either ignore me or are relatively polite. It does have its problems. We have two gymnasiums, and few art classes. Not nearly enough attention is paid to the arts, but that is changing. I have not always been accepted, but my worst year was 8th grade, the first year, and middle school’s always worse. What’s the price for such an education? $10,000 a year. For a private education. Luckily, my parents can afford it. Most can’t, and send their children to the public schools. To the trenches. We must change our schools. I just wish change came quickly and easily. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/paranoia-everywhere-in-school-systems/28016.md?page=2)