By Mike Hiestand
It’s been more than six months since the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. While the doors to the school reopened this fall, the other casualties of that tragedy continue to mount.
More than any other event, the scale and sheer callousness of the Columbine tragedy seems to have pushed many Americans over a line they had moved perilously close to already: America’s youth, they have now concluded, simply cannot be trusted.
This loss of trust has manifested itself in various ways as school officials across the country responded quickly to the public’s fear and its demand that something-anything-be done to control students and prevent a Columbine-like tragedy from occurring within their city limits.
For example, as this school year began, school’s that had argued about the installation of metal detectors at their doors for years no longer saw the need for deliberation; along with their new class schedules, many students were issued mandatory identification badges; uniformed police became as common a fixture in our high schools as the yellow school bus; dress codes became ever more restrictive; the need for surveillance cameras and locker searches was no longer seriously questioned; and politicians, at least for a while, actively debated the introduction of teachers into the classroom armed with concealed handguns.
Regrettably, the post-Columbine hysteria also quickly spilled over onto America’s student media-and indeed, all forms of youth expression-which was and will continue to be one of the lasting and more serious casualties. After all, the reasoning seems to go, if you don’t trust them, why listen to them?
In the days and months that followed Columbine, the news media was full of stories of students being punished for publishing lawful websites at home or for articles they had written in student publications that were even remotely perceived as “threatening.” Some student journalists-while not condoning what happened in Colorado-reported being singled out for even expressing a sense of understanding about how students treated as outcasts by their peers might be driven to violence. The more we listened, the loonier the responses became. In one of the scarier knee-jerk reactions, a North Carolina high school student was jailed and expelled when, in referring to the approach of the Year 2000, he dared joke in a message on the school’s computer system: “The end is near.” Unbelievably, a jury upheld the school’s response as reasonable.
“They used him as an example,” the teenager’s mother said after the trial. “They’ve taken away a child’s life.” Yet another casualty of Columbine.
Teaching our youngest citizens about the importance of individual liberties has long been an uphill battle. It’s hard to convince 16-year-olds about the value of a strong First Amendment and an independent press when they have experienced firsthand that those rights seem to exist only in a civics class textbook. But, as journalism educators, we continue to make the effort because we know few others will.
We will probably never know why tragedies like Columbine High School happen. What we do know, though, is that the climate and blind fear sparked by last April’s events ensure one thing: the lasting tragedy of Columbine will not just be the unspeakable acts committed within the school, but the the unthinking acts of those outside.