Schools are cracking down nonetheless, on the theory that lightning can strike anywhere. Cops are a fixture in many schools (Houston Independent School District alone employs a stunning 177 officers), and so are keycards for entry. And all over the nation, schools have installed phone lines for anonymous tips; administrators must spend hours following up on the calls. "We push the staff almost to the breaking point to investigate every one," says Tom Miller, a school official in Port Huron, Mich. At some schools—including Columbine, understandably—the tips lead automatically to a police investigation, even when they are benign comments taken out of context.

That was the case with the high school student represented by Micki Moran, a family-law attorney in the Chicago suburbs. In 1999, nine days after Columbine, the student, a ninth-grade boy from Wheeling, Ill., was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, though the police considered more serious charges, including mayhem. Classmates thought of him as an "unpopular nerd," Moran says, and made fun of his black clothes. One day at lunch, a group of kids approached him; one said, "You're like those kids at Columbine." The boy responded, "I could be." On the strength of those three little words, Moran says, hysteria broke out at the school as rumors swirled about his possible intent. His locker was searched, and the baseball bat found inside was labeled a weapon. The entire school was evacuated. The boy spent six months in counseling and is now flourishing at another school. The school has said that under the circumstances, it acted appropriately.

But the post-Columbine story is not always about overreaction. Officials at some schools, including those that have witnessed tragedies, have found ways of persuading students to communicate calmly their worries to teachers they trust. At Deming Middle School in New Mexico, where Araceli Tena was shot in the head by a classmate in 1999, principal Mike Chavez has visited every classroom to talk about the damage of spreading baseless rumors. The Santee news didn't cause a flurry of bogus threats or panicky tips at Deming this week, as it did at so many other schools. Similarly, officials in Jefferson County, Colo., home of Columbine, say the results of two surveys—one taken last year and one just before the carnage—show that the district's students did not feel less safe a year after the killings. Which is sad in a way: you don't fear what you know intimately. It's the rest of us who are hysterical.

To be sure, some good has come as a result of the soul searching. In Hoyt, Kans., where three students were arrested last month after they allegedly planned to bomb Royal Valley High School, student-council president Tara Goodman, 18, says the barriers that once divided students from teachers have vanished. In Oxnard, Calif., where cops killed a Hueneme High School student who was holding a classmate hostage in January, principals throughout the district now have two-way radios to be used if the phone lines go dead. Those will come in handy during any kind of disaster.

Anything seems possible after Columbine, but should it? Students at our high schools may be the best authority on this question, and they are a lot less worried than their parents about getting shot. Although 70% of adults in an April 2000 poll said they believe a shooting was likely in their neighborhood's school, in a fall 1999 poll a similar percentage of students said they feel personally safe from campus violence. Says Joanne McDaniel, director of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence: "We still have a lot of people saying it could not happen here, but we have a lot more who are realizing they need to be vigilant." The question is, Can administrators and students be vigilant without being vigilantes?

— Reported by Wendy Cole and David Thigpen/Chicago, Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque, Rita Healy/Denver, David S. Jackson/Twentynine Palms, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Tim Roche/Atlanta and Rebecca Winters/New York

From the March 19, 2001 issue of TIME Magazine

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