I’ve been writing about how… bad my high school experience was, starting with the fact that administration didn’t like the number of bomb threats we had been getting having opened our doors to all four high school grades for the first time and so stated that they would ignore all bomb threats in subsequent years. We went from having bomb threats sometimes three or four days per week to none, and this could seriously have gotten someone killed, especially because students became aware that the administration had made the decision to ignore — not to act on — any bomb threats. It more or less maintained that level of bad until my senior year when a freshman climbed on top of the art building shouting that he was going to kill himself, and everyone who could see what he was doing except for me and some friends began cheering at him to jump. Because we knew who he was, we had to make our way through the throng of students that were assembling in the cafeteria that morning to watch him do what he was doing to get to the student activities director’s office to tell her, and she quickly put in a call to the front office who then put in a call to emergency services because EMTs had to actually go up there and sedate him so that he could safely be brought down.

The school let him come back maybe a week later with a slap on the wrist and a “don’t do that again”.

It was around this point that he began needling at people that he thought might beat him up in response to intentionally annoying them, and he was eventually removed from active enrollment for a second and slightly longer period of time. But my high school didn’t even attempt to connect his family with services for what he… did, because he was initially back to school in a matter of days as though nothing had happened. And it didn’t even surprise me that so many students were cheering at him to jump from the building, either. I mean, that’s par for the course, especially around here, and especially as the years would go on. I don’t have that many good things to say about any of the schools that I attended in this district at all (or, well, any, heh).