Anyway, I prevented a shooting from occurring at the end of my senior year of high school.

And in the process, I turned in someone who had — up until that point, anyway — been my boyfriend. In front of his best friend and me, he said that he wanted to bring his father’s gun to school (quoting the make and model) and “shoot the freshman class up because they annoyed him”. Not expecting him to say something like this at all, I turned him in to the front office as soon as I could. However, I practically had to beg them to investigate, because they initially weren’t going to… not until I provided them the name of his best friend, they questioned him, he backed up everything that I had told them and had echoed the same concerns that I had voiced. Then and only then did they begin to investigate my claims. They started by investigating his home, and that was when they found out that his father owned the exact make and model gun that I told the front office he owned. This made my story a lot more credible, and raised the risk that he would follow through on his threat by a lot — he had even gone so far as to state that he intended on doing it at the end of the school year, which was also something that I told our school because he specified a time.

I didn’t know until the investigation had already concluded that his parents had to be compelled to cooperate with the investigation for as little of it as they did, and that they actively thwarted it incredibly early on into it by withdrawing their son as a student with the intent to homeschool him from that point forward “so that (this) didn’t go on his permanent record and ruin his life”. After the investigation had concluded, the principal called me into her office to personally thank me for turning him in, stating that my actions had prevented what they thought was almost a surety of a shooting. She also told me that, along with the rest of what I’m writing about, our school had more thoroughly investigated his transfer in from his previous school — which was overseas — because he did not transfer in at the grade that his age would have had him at, come to find out that he had repeatedly been held back for behavioral reasons, and that because this school was in another country they were permitted to refuse to advance him up in grade purely for this reason. For some reason, this got lost in the oversight that was the paper-pushing mill of him transferring in and our school did not think to question it as heavily as they should have, which our (my?) principal admitted to me. They just took it at face value and accepted him into the grade that his former school stated he was, well, to be in…

But yeah, that was how I was put in the position to where I had to prevent a school shooting as a senior.

Since I was making posts about how awful my high school experience was…

I know that I’ve mentioned this before, but at the start of my senior year, a freshman climbed on top of the art building and threatened to jump from it. My friends and I were the ones that had to let an adult at the school know because everyone else in the cafeteria (from which the art hallway and building could easily be seen) was chanting at him to jump. We let the Student Life director know, who called the front office when she confirmed that what we were telling her was true, and emergency services were called to the school. Apparently the student had to be tranquilized to safely get him off of the building… and he was allowed to come right back to school the following week like nothing at all had happened. He began attempting to pick fights with people who he thought would beat him up, and after the school found out about this, he stayed gone for a longer period of time. (However, the school did once again allow him to return some time after this as I found out after I had graduated. This was problematic for several reasons, many of which are obvious.)

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).

My high school experience was so awful due to the school that I was zoned for, and attended, that I let the principal know at the end of my senior year when we were discussing something — that I suppose I will eventually get to — that I didn’t want the school to contact me after graduation for any reason, and I made sure to hide well enough not to be invited to my first class reunion. So far, I haven’t been contacted, which is good, and I speculate that I won’t be invited to any class reunions since I have made my desire not to attend any of them abundantly clear. To date, I am only friends with one single person that attended my high school the same time as me on Facebook, and he only attended my freshman year before his father, being in the military, was assigned somewhere else and he had to move. Anyway, getting to the actual point of this…

My high school became a four-year high school during my freshman year, and we had an almost record-setting number of bomb threats called in that year. The next year, though… radio silence. I eventually found out that a teacher had accidentally admitted to a student that all bomb threats called in that year were actively being ignored because the school administration had requested that they be ignored and no action taken on them. I would have much rathered that action be taken on bomb threats being called in when there were no bombs on campus than for there to actually be, or have been, a bomb on campus that administration “ignored” because they didn’t like having to order that the school be evacuated each time this occurred. And for the rest of the time that I was a student at this school, we didn’t have a single bomb threat, so I knew that any that were being called in were being ignored. It weren’t as though our school, or even this city, was low on crime. People could have gotten killed due to administration not wanting “inconvenience”.

We had the same principal from the school’s inception until 2006, so I can’t really speak beyond that point.