Exhibitions and news crews

If you've ever been depressed watching the news or are convinced that today's youth are a like a grape juice stain on a wedding dress, think about where you are getting information from. Case in point: last thursday we had an "incident" in the building. I'm not sure if I have explained this before but the school I teach in was part of a big re-vamping of the school system that happened 3 years ago. Over the summer the school, which I'll call the Kennedy School, was broken down into three separate schools: one school per floor, separate bell schedules, classes, start and end times, lunches, staff and administration (the only thing that remains shared are the sports teams). Each school has a different focus: my school is technology, the 2nd floor is business and the third floor is "public service." Students are assigned to various schools via lottery: in the spring they apply to any number of schools that they want to go to and for the most part it is completely random where they end up. My school has a huge waiting list, the school on the 2nd floor has about 75 kids apply, yet 300 end up there and the school on the 3rd floor has all of seven kids apply for 300 spots. Getting the picture? Ok, so the "incident" involved one student with three counts against him, 2 news crews and the Fox news helicopter.

While this whole debacle was going on upstairs, downstairs we were getting ready for exhibition night. Exhibition night is when we showcase the best student work from the year and have the underclass awards ceremony. Some of the student work highlights included a movie that some juniors made about their Facing History trip to Europe, websites displaying everything from sonnets to Macromedia Flash movies, even students re-enacting a scene from Macbeth. At the award ceremony, seven students were lauded for perfect attendance (which even included never being tardy to school). Out of the 55 seniors, 46 have been accepted to 4 year colleges (Smith, Northeastern, Delaware State, UMass, Curry, Suffolk, etc..) and have raised over 1.25 million dollars in scholarship money. But was any of this on the news? Nope. The next time you hear that some kid stole chemicals, tried to make a bomb and ended up blinding himself or that a kid brought a gun to school, please remember not all inner city kids are gangbusters.