Willi wrote in news:3ffaffdb$0$199$75868355
@news.frii.net:

Although there were fights, no weapons were ever involved and there
were
no serious injuries.

There's a few differences between times now and times then. Cops have
been deployed in this school for about 10 years now--it just seems to be
hitting the press in a bigger way.

The "no weapons" and "no injuries" didn't apply when I was there 20 years
ago. Plenty of weapons were in the school (some, I know, were carried
because perfectly good kids were scared to be there), and plenty of
people got hurt. It's much worse now. The weapons were mostly knives
and box cutters back then. Now, as in many schools in the country, the
weapons are guns, despite metal detectors.

The scariest thing was told to me by one of my oldest friends, who ended
up being one of the police officers patrolling this particular school in
the mid '90s. The cops in the schools consider the high schools to be
one of the most dangerous duties they can pull! Students attempted to
disarm him three times in two years of duty, and they managed to disarm
one of the police women stationed at the school, stealing her weapon
right out of her holster. He still considers himself lucky not to have
been seriously hurt.

When I was there 20 years ago, the place was evacuated twice during
school hours-- once for riots (I swear, right in the middle of a social
studies exam I was tanking, and on my way out I passed two overturned
police cars), and once for an arson fire (I swear again, right in the
middle of my calc AP exam, which had to be finished two weeks later, and
filed with "testing irregularities" at Princeton) that was easily brought
under control. I remember at least one bomb scare that had the place
evacuated after hours. Muggings were a regular event. All this went on
despite the fact that this was the first high school in the state to have
full video surveillance of all the hallways and stairwells. Two years
after I graduated, about 20% of the school was burned down in an act of
arson, during school hours.

South Shore has been consistently rated highest in murders and violent
crime for high schools in the five boroughs, and about fourth for crime
overall (that low ranking has the alumni pressuring the administration
for a new arson coach!).

I don't know if you've ever spent any significant amount of time in an
area with high gang activity. The callous disregard for life is
absolutely horrific, and its a ton worse now than it was twenty years
ago. Back then, when a high school student met a violent death, it was
still a surprise--I'll never forget the night my brother found a kid from
down the street near death from a stab wound in our driveway (he lived,
even though his heart was nicked). Today, that kind of event is
tragically a fact of life.

Scott