The air is sweet and the stars are out, the milky streetlamps still lit at 5:45. It would be a great morning to be fishing. The school doors are already open when principal Pat Voss pads up the front steps in her cranberry Goofy T shirt and heads for the main office. Nancy Giessmann is in the cafeteria making breakfast, Vron Murphy is in the office doing photocopying left from the night before. The flag next to the front steps is still flying at half-staff, in honor of the teacher who dropped dead in the hallway between periods two weeks ago.
Voss, universally known as P.V., climbs up to the windowless weight room above the gym for her morning workout: abdominal crunches in sets of 20, leg presses and toe raises, free weights for working her obliques. She’s thinking about tonight’s school-board meeting. A survey last year found that most people in town are happy with the schools–which she considers a challenge. “That could mean they’re less willing to spend more to improve them.”
The building is brick and stone, sprawling in all directions, additions stapled on here, an annex there, accidental courtyards created in between as the building grew to accommodate 1,300-plus kids and their growing appetites. Just two years ago, if you plugged in a computer, it might have blown out a circuit. The school has been rewired since then. Chief custodian Frank Schaffer is already inspecting the premises, moving back the picnic tables that the skateboarders clear out every weekend. He knows every inch of the place, from the mile of utility tunnels in the basement to the old attic that was once used as a rifle range. “This building is a living organism,” he says. “It lives for the people inside it.”
The first wave of students arrives at 6:55 a.m. Six buses from downtown St. Louis pull in bearing the “deseg” kids, most of whom head for the cafeteria. The band members have practice most days before school; drowsy musicians start stumbling onto the field across from the entrance. Jacob Myerson is upstairs in a dim hallway, sitting on the floor outside Room 319, some 40 minutes early for class, studying vocabulary words. Histrionic. Poignant. Unkempt. Loquacious. He wants to go to Princeton.
By 6:45 a.m. Detective Dave Dreher has already been briefed by the Webster Groves police department about the weekend. “If no crimes were committed over the weekend, no juvenile matters, nobody arrested, nobody hurt, no traffic accidents, nobody locked up that I have to go interview, then that’s a good morning. We’re having a good morning.” His loaded Smith & Wesson, his badge and his beeper are all hidden under his brown sports jacket, but he carries the school’s ubiquitous power symbol, a walkie-talkie, and it will crackle and sputter plenty before the day is safely started.
Nurse Lynn Buss is preparing for the Monday flood. Her “clinic” is tucked away on the first floor of the pre-1935 extension that she calls “the North Forty” because of its remoteness. The first wave consists of girls who march straight into one of three exam rooms, where they throw down their bookbags, turn out the lights and flop onto cots, asleep before they hit the pillow. Nurse Buss is unfazed. “These kids who get bused in from the city get up before 5,” she explains. “They come here to sleep for half an hour before class.”
The rest of the population begins to stir. The students come from every direction, by bus, on foot, in every size and shape of car. Some slouch through the doors, some bounce, some seem so fully grown, others are toddlers; they wear shorts and parkas and black trench coats; they are dyed and pierced and bespectacled and mascaraed and pumped up and wasted away; and none of them are typical–there is no such thing as average.
As they come in the front doors, they pass a big display case holding a new mural that is under construction by some seniors. THE THINGS WE VALUE AND BELIEVE IN, it says in bright letters, with white clouds and smiling kids made of construction paper and all the students’ names and thoughts pasted on in little fortune-cookie strips of revelation. DREAMS, says one. MIRACLES. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. ART. But lest anyone mistake this for a giant Hallmark card, there is much more here. LONELINESS. GREED. AN EYE FOR AN EYE. PARTIES. WEAKNESS. DRAGONS. ABSTINENCE. JUSTICE. WEALTH. PEOPLE CAN CHANGE.
Nurse Buss slips down to the cafeteria to haul back a bucket of ice. “My major cure,” she notes. “When in doubt, put ice on it.” She flushes an amorous couple from the girls’ room in the back. “We were just talking,” the boy protests. The kids are already lining up outside her office: one girl is there for iron pills to treat her anemia–a poor substitute, notes Buss, for what she really needs, which is a decent diet. Another has a bruised hand from a fight over the weekend; a boy wants Tylenol for a stomachache; she gives him baking soda and water.
A girl who forgot her inhaler is having an asthma attack. Buss draws her a glass of tap water and instructs her to gulp it down quickly; the shock of the intrusion, she says, often releases the asthmatic constriction. Part 2 of this home remedy is a shot of Diet Coke; the caffeine sometimes has a similar effect. Outside, the marching band is rehearsing the borrowed strains of On Wisconsin. Buss predicts, “By November I’ll be able to walk out there and play it myself.”
Senior Sarah Bradberry sits on the floor, reading The Whipping Boy for her children’s literature class. She scribbles answers to questions printed on purple paper, homework she should have done over the weekend. The class, she says, is easy. All the students do is interpret books written at third-grade levels. “I need the English credit to graduate,” she says. Just down the hall, you see another kid, copying answers from one purple sheet to another.
Two kids wearing hats spot Detective Dreher in the hall and whip them off; this year there is a no-hat rule. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he says. The school doesn’t want anyone wearing anything that might identify them as a member of an exclusive group; last year, says an openly gay student, the kids who harassed him the most were known as the White Hatters, after their headgear. The administration also worried about kids’ starting to wear gang colors.
Detective Dreher is treated with respect, even affection; he’s been known to drive kids home at night or spring for a cab when they’re stranded, call them in the morning to be sure they’re up, use the office slim-jim to help them break into their cars when they lock the keys inside, throw in a job reference for a dropout at his brother-in-law’s restaurant. At 7:50 his walkie-talkie erupts with a call from principal Voss; custodian Schaffer has discovered obscene graffiti in the parking lot and on the grass. Dreher can see them from where he’s standing. After finding Schaffer and having a quick conference with Voss by walkie-talkie, Dreher gets a digital camera to record the writing–so he can see if it matches the work of any known culprits–before the custodian sets to work with his cleansers.
Walking counselor Bob Walker, balancing two boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts he’s brought in for the school’s secretaries, is on the move. He’s a big man, ex-Navy, with a voice higher than you’d expect and clothes a size too small. It’s his job to catch the smokers, the illegal parkers, the kids without hall passes. “Ninety-eight percent of our students are really good kids,” he says, “but I don’t really know any of them. It’s the other 2% that take all my time.”
He’s used to Monday morning as a rough passage, bursting out with a cheery “good morning” every time students pass by; they give him the look of death as they mutter their hellos. A few are carrying a bagged McDonald’s breakfast with them as they exit the parking lot. By 7:10 a.m., the street behind the school is filled with cars. Seniors get first dibs on the few precious spaces in the lot as long as they’re willing to pay $45 a year, so underclassmen with cars must search for any spaces around the school. Those who do use the lot seem to have silently reached an agreement as to who will get to park in a particular space. “Rule No. 1 of the parking lot,” says Walker: “Do not run over the fat man with the walkie-talkie.”
By now there are more than 40 members of the marching band scattered on the field across from the school entrance. Like a flock of birds forming a flying pattern, the musicians sort into 10 parallel lines grouped by instrument. The flutes–17 girls and one boy–are on the far left, and the lower brass–all but one of them boys–are on the far right. They serenade the parked buses, the kids draped on the front steps. “It’s a poor substitute for coffee,” says a spectator as the tempo picks up. “This Sunday I’m gonna discreetly plant land mines all over that field.” He pauses. “Or maybe build a Burmese tiger trap.”
After scales and On Wisconsin, Dane Williams, the band’s faculty leader, calls the members into the center of the field for a pep talk cum encounter session. Over the past couple of weeks the drum majors have been fighting, accusing each other of being bossy, and band members are beginning to take sides. Mr. Williams, in blue jeans and an orange faded polo, tells the band that he knows what’s going on and says, “I want you to think: Are you saying things to your peers that you might regret?”
Head librarian Grant Brady is in the library, with a problem. He has been wondering for a while now what to do with a book called Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement, that is hidden under a stack of papers on a desk. He ordered the book based on catalog descriptions, thinking it would provide insight on gay politics. When the book arrived, however, he found that it included several frontal nude photos of men. He has never been told to get rid of a book, and he doesn’t want to be a censor–but he would not have bought the book if he had known about the photos. He has not decided what to do.
On the roof, two young men sprint on their tiptoes across the asphalt, careful not to draw the attention of the band practicing across the street. “Stay low,” one tells the other. “Get down.” They are carrying the head of a female mannequin that they’ve named Headrietta, which they borrowed from a Spanish teacher’s closet. They reach the edge of the roof and count off spaces to a classroom below. They lie on their stomachs, leaning over the edge, and lower the head down the side of the building by a string tied to its blond hair. “Over to the left… Over to the left!” When they bang it against a third-floor window, several girls in a classroom scream. The pranksters giggle and scramble back across the roof and hustle down a ladder. They don’t want to be late for the start of the next class period. After all, they are the teachers.
Brian Yates and Terry Verstraete are the class clowns among the faculty. Last year the pair, along with math teacher Eric Dunn, climbed on the roof and aimed Super Soaker water guns at students on the sidewalk below. A woman who lives across the street called the police, saying kids were on the roof with guns. They saw a police officer circling the building and hurried down, just in time to be greeted by an assistant principal who radioed Pat Voss that he had captured the culprits.
“Students?” Voss asked. When he answered no, Voss hesitated before asking with a strained voice, “Faculty?”
None of the teachers was reprimanded, but students–and colleagues–won’t soon let them forget. “We call them Pat’s Children,” says a teacher. Their practical jokes are nothing more than “humor interventions,” they say. “We do it to relieve the stress,” says Verstraete. “We like to keep things saucy.”
–N.G.