CG Experience

Unwilling individuals being forced into a building are then made to stand up and observe fools marching across the floor to a corny song. Banners hanging everywhere proclaim the leaders of this fun little mandatory get-together. The music is then cut off and the man himself steps up and screams that dissenters will be dealt with accordingly. Then the mass of people in the stands goes on to hear about the upcoming victory that will soon be theirs. Are we at a Nuremberg rally in Nazi Germany? Try again. We’re at a Center Grove High School pep session. This is only one experience I have to share with you kids.
Let’s talk now about the school bureaucracy. The zero tolerance policy is a joke. I’ve been threatened by a student named Zack on multiple occasions, and apparently so has Bill. I remember the first threat came after I had turned in Zack and another kid named Frank for violating the school’s technology policy. Zack was a library aide and he had access to all of the student computer passwords in the school. Frank was getting revenge on people who he hated by getting their passwords from Zack and getting on their individually allocated hard drives so that he could clear them of all files. This was very disturbing to me when I found out, because I was in a programming class where all of our work was done and stored in the school’s network. Frank and I were on bad terms back then and I realized that if he cleared my hard drive, I would possibly flunk that class. Another kid that Frank hated, Herman had already been a victim of this passive-aggressive behavior. Herman was in my programming class when he realized that it had happened to him.
Also on the side Frank was selling a file named Bess.bat on a floppy disk to various students. This file was a means of bypassing the Internet filter so that a person could go to any website that they wanted.
Bill and I went to Trael with this alarming information and nothing really even happened. Zack turned himself and Frank in, so he only got a day of In School Suspension and was still allowed to be a library aide. Frank got five days of Out of School Suspension, which isn’t really a punishment since those days don’t count toward the absence limit, and also because you get to make up the work that you miss. This was the end of the year so the “work” was finals for each class. Anyway, the result of this was a death threat by Zack. He said that he would run me over with his car. Again I went to Trael. Nothing was done to Zack despite the school’s supposed zero tolerance policy. He threatened me on other occasions and got off clean each time. Great policy.
How about the new lunch system? The lunch ladies don’t like it. The students don’t like it. Somehow this school has the authority to make a plastic card the new legal tender. Along with this inefficient system came ridiculous new rules. You can’t buy lunch on more than one tray. You can’t buy a Hawaiian Punch if you use a yellow slip instead of your ID card. You can’t buy lunch for other people with your own money and your own card. Who comes up with this stuff? There must be a pretty bored administrator somewhere along the line. And the funniest thing of all is nobody will tell me why we have this lunch system. Dr. L won’t tell me, the lunch ladies won’t tell me. I would probably have to talk to the superintendent, and he would probably give me some lame excuse that would get me no further than before just like Dr. L did. I’m gone in a month and two weeks so it’s not worth pursuing any further.
Another ridiculous rule is the one that requires students to stay in the cafeteria or the library the whole lunch period. The rule was not there last year. It was possible last year to eat lunch and then go to the quietest spot in the school to have a nice chat. This year everything changed. Mr. B now is a guard dog in the main hallway for Mrs. B and since you can get around him, you have to deal directly with her when you walk in the doors. To protest the ludicrous new rule, Bill and I continued to go every day until the sixth or seventh time when we were given lunch detention for the rest of the year. We would have been suspended but Mr. K said he wanted to go light on us. What a horrible atrocity we had committed! Just the thought of wanting to go sit and hear myself think or maybe get a book during lunch makes my stomach churn. The pits of hell have surely opened for me.
Dr. L’s reply to Bill’s statement that this school ran things like it was a police state was that Bill had no idea what a police state was like. I’d say being forced to spend four years in a building where power-tripping administrators can limit the Constitutional rights, and have cameras and “random” drug testing is about as close as you can get.