Sunday, May 23, 1999
Truth about teen-agers found at Ryle
Alert level went up 5 years ago
BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
UNION — Last Monday at Ryle High School began with a thin, teary-eyed girl standing in the front office.
“I'm sick,” she said. “I need to call my mom.”
Principal Randy Cooper sized up the situation. He's good at this. Every morning without fail, he stands in the lobby at Ryle and watches kids. In this way, patterns emerge. Relationships become clear. Most teen-agers are transparent enough that alert adults can read their faces, and Randy Cooper is a very alert man.
His theory about the girl: She had a fight with her boyfriend.
He saw the couple earlier in the morning, and the girl wasn't sick then. They probably fussed, she went to the bathroom for a cry, and now she has worried herself sick.
Mr. Cooper sounds regretful. He hates for any student to miss class.
If his tone doesn't ooze sympathy for the young woman, it at least inspires confi dence. Here's a guy who knows what's going on in his school.
Thank goodness.
The way the news and movies tell it, today's teen-agers are preoccupied with forming cliques, brooding, picking on nerds, ignoring adults, dressing like vampires and eventually exploding.
Teen-agers have become exotic creatures. Inscrutable. More than a little scary.
Ryle is as good a place as any to find out the truth. Five years ago, a student named Clay Shrout killed his family and briefly held a class hostage. This spring, the last students with any memory of him will graduate.
In the halls on Monday, a collage of images suggested that teen-age life goes on:
The tearful girl in the front office. Twenty students sweating out an advanced placement test in the auditorium. A sophomore dipping French fries into chocolate pudding at lunch. Another smiling wide to dis play a goofy set of fake teeth.
In the cafeteria, one boy sat utterly alone, eating his food without looking up from a Star Wars book.
After lunch, chemistry teacher Russ Ryan dropped to his knees and exhorted students to become voters. Science issues are important, he told them. What about this cloning stuff? They're talking about manufacturing people without heads, so their bodies can be used for organ transplants.
The students pondered this. Then somebody piped up: “What if you need an ear?”
Teen-agers are funny. They act like innocent kids one minute and dark old souls the next. They hang miniature Mr. Potato Heads from their backpacks, then turn in grisly short stories.
“I look 'em in the eye, every one of them, every day,” says Mr. Ryan, who had Clay Shrout in class. “After you're older, and especially if you have kids, you can tell if something's not right just by looking at them.”
Ryle is a remarkably quiet and orderly school, despite a smattering of the usual problems. This spring, students were evacuated after a bomb threat, and secretaries now
answer the phone with, “Your call is being monitored.” After the Columbine High School shootings, a threatening message popped up on 200 computers at Ryle. Police are investigating.
Still, the place appears calm. There is an abundance of conformity. A small army of students, mostly wearing jeans and T-shirts, moves at a low hum from one class to the next without the benefit of noisy bells. Ryle has never had bells. Mr. Cooper expects students to tell time.
There isn't much diversity here. In a school of 1,100, students can count their minority classmates on a couple of hands.
There are cliques, of course. The preps, the jocks, the skaters, the rednecks. “Scrubs” are students who go without regular baths, apparently to achieve a fashionable greasiness. “Korn kids” are those who like a band called Korn, which commits a music called hardcore.
Sources say there are about two goths at Ryle — kids who are preternaturally pale, into vampires and partial to black clothing.
Teachers manage this universe with a mix of instinct and standard policy.
The Shrout incident brought about an emergency plan: Every year, ad ministrators choose an innocuous code sentence — something like, “Saturday's faculty meeting has been canceled” — to indicate a problem. When teachers hear this code, they are to pull stray kids out of the halls and lock their classroom doors. So far, the code has never been used.
Teachers also are on the lookout for “alert papers.” These are stories or essays that raise red flags about their authors. Recently, one teacher agonized over turning in a murder story written by a student she liked and trusted. In the end, the teacher had no choice. The student's parents were contacted and the story's con tents discussed.
Joanne Henry, a long-time teacher, says class work can be deceiving. Teen-agers naturally gravitate toward the macabre.
She had one student who constantly wrote about war.
“It was just, "blood this, blood that.' After awhile I was like, "Can't you write something else?' He was like, "Oh, OK.” And he wrote something else that was just lovely.”
English teacher Nancy Walton watches her students closely.
Recently, she worried about the large number who described themselves, on a career aptitude test, as lacking self-esteem. She's careful not to call on the ones with anxiety problems. She never puts F's on papers anymore.
In her classroom, a stuffed bear named Klondike sits atop some cabinets. Ms. Walton keeps him in case students need a hug. One girl holds Klondike on her lap throughout class. Recently, the bear went to a student's birthday party and returned wearing a miniskirt.
Ms. Walton begins each period by asking students to share their news. On Monday, one boy told about his chance to play tennis in a big tournament. Another offered his take on the prom: “It was good, getting your booty down on the floor.”
Ms. Walton played dumb.
“Does that mean dancing?” she asked, and wiggled her hips. Everyone laughed.
Monday was a pretty good day at Ryle High School.
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. E-mail her at ksamples@enquirer.com
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE