Home Grown Terrorism

We had a faculty meeting the day after our third bomb threat in two weeks. Principal Sue Dell ditched the normal agenda so we could talk about our feelings.    It was a difficult session. A lot of people were sad and angry about this home-grown terrorism. Teachers who had been around Conval for a long time were mourning the death of an era in which we talked about lesson plans, not emergency plans. What happened? 

One administrator suggested an answer. "We have a different socioeconomic profile," he said. "It's the haves and the have-nots. We have kids coming to school now with problems we couldn't imagine 20 years ago."

This is not news. For a long time, educational researchers have been saying that the main factor in academic success is economic status. There are individual exceptions, of course -- poor kids who do very well and kids from wealthy families who couldn't care less. But mostly, the formula works: Kids from rich families do better than kids from poor families.

You can see it most clearly in what some call the "digital divide," the gap between those with access to computers and those without. Last year, we were urged to e-mail weekly progress reports to the parents of kids who were doing poorly. Guess what? Not one of my under performing students had an e-mail address. Some of them didn't have a telephone number.

When I teach my freshmen Black Boy, Richard Wright's devastating memoir of growing up poor in the Deep South, I ask them to write about a frightening experience from their pasts. Kids who get A's and B's usually describe the normal childhood terrors -- scary dogs, getting lost at the mall, monsters under the bed. One girl wrote about sitting up in bed every night looking out the window, fearful that her parents would drive away and leave her.

Less successful students -- the ones who struggle to read and write, who hate coming to school, who defy adult authority -- write about death, divorce, drugs and alcohol. They write about moving frequently and how hard it is to make new friends. They write about parents who really did drive away and leave them. They write about physical and sexual abuse -- monsters in the bed, not under it.

"But this is Peterborough!" we say. "This is Conval! It can't happen here!"  I'm sure parents and teachers said the same thing in New Bedford and Springfield and Chelsea, Vermont, when horrific things happened. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere.

I don't worry about someone building an infernal device and smuggling it into Conval. I worry about the ticking bombs who walk into school every morning without a shred of hope that they'll succeed. We need an emergency plan for them.