I couldn't help but add
one last incident to this very long list. This happened to a
friend of mine but involved me, during our last year of high school (his senior and my junior/senior year..i didn't have a senior year.)
One evening we were talking on the phone, we were both on portable but not cellular phones, in our respective houses. Caleb was in his living room, and kept peeking through the blinds out onto the street outside. The topic of discussion was the cop car that had been parked outside his home for about 4 hours. There was an officer inside, not doing anything we could fathom. When talk and speculation got old, we began discussing the point regimen for killing people. This is a game we often played in high school...for example. Kids are 10 points, adults 20 points. If the person is over weight it's an added 5-10 points, depending on the comic nature of the person and just generally how they look. If they're moving, depending on mode of transportation, you add 10-20 points. Back to the main idea...
About a week after this random, non-specific conversation that for us blended into a series of like conversations between ourselves and others, Caleb got called into his AP's office. This is an honor student, high above average and very, very non confrontational. The only other time he had been sent to the AP was when he refused to say the Pledge of Alligence, a fight he (rightly) won in the end. The thing is, Caleb is one of the few and proud actual punk rock kids that made it out to the small town of Magnolia, TX. His long, spikey hair, septum piercing, bright and often musical clothing, and soft, laid-back manor were just a bit too uncommon for comfort...Thus making him bad in the eyes of the administration. Whatever.
So I was interested in why my closest friend spent close to an hour in the AP's office. It turned out, comically, that the cop sitting outside his house had been monitoring our phone call. (is that legal??!?!?!?) and they were concerned with this "killing people for points" discussion we had been having. Did I get called in? No...probably because my parents were prominent in the small town scene and I was like Caleb, just less obtrusive (I guess...) I didn't have any facial piercings, but I got my own amount of strange looks. Everyone seemed to think I was this feminist-activist really smart weird girl. Whatever...this wasn't a really accurate opinion. Anyway, we found this really funny. Yes, it infringed on our rights, but they couldn't punish us for something totally unrelated to school and probably illegal that they had done. And I was never spoken to about it, so who knows where it would have gone had Caleb been the riotous type...