Author goes back to high school

For AP Special Features

In the middle of a practice Code Blue crisis at Prior Lake High School, senior Roger Murphy says: "If someone really wanted to kill us, they will. And pretending that's not true is just stupid."

Murphy's comment sums up the attitudes of his classmates: powerlessness and cynicism.

In "Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School," Elinor Burkett chronicles the year she spent at Prior Lake to understand "what's going on" in the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999.

Prior Lake is an affluent, mostly white suburb just south of Minneapolis, and the high school has better-than-average test scores. If Brenda and Brandon Walsh, fictional Minnesota natives on "Beverly Hills 90210," hadn't moved west, they would have attended Prior Lake High. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine shooters, could just as easily have been Prior Lake students instead.

From the fall of 1999 to spring graduation, Burkett went everywhere the students went: classes, football games, pep fests, senior pranks, the cafeteria and pot-smoking parties. She also sat in on teacher gripe sessions, disciplinary meetings and class planning.

Her reporting is keen; she works every detail that is part of the high school landscape, even the small ones. Describing the school's furniture, she writes: "... those undersized blue plastic desk-chairs that are the hallmark of American schools. They're the kind of furniture perfect for a business that wants to encourage its customers not to linger. High school students, of course, have little choice but to remain."

Burkett seizes on typical scenes, such as the ongoing battle about the dress code, as inlets to examine much more complex issues: zero tolerance; the bureaucratic alienation of teachers from their students, parents and other teachers; teen ennui; and the problems of the self-esteem movement in public education.

One of the book's most disturbing revelations comes not from the students, some of whom surely were naughty and unruly, but from the faculty. One year after Columbine, on April 20, 2000, the school remains open as a symbol of perseverance even though Mara Corey, a first-year English teacher, had received multiple death threats scrawled on the walls of the girls' bathroom in the days previous.

Burkett observes: "Behind Corey's back, they scoffed at her predicament, which became a focus for their open dislike of their newest colleague. Building her penchant for exaggeration and her dramatic flair into a pathological need for attention, they concluded, albeit without a shred of evidence that the young woman was penning the threats herself. 'Do you remember the teacher out west who blew herself up to call attention to herself?' they asked. 'That's Corey."'

In spite of outrageous behavior from both students and faculty, Burkett is careful never to condescend or unduly editorialize her cast of characters -- the guy in the Dead Kennedys T-shirt, the resident genius, the busybody dean of students, the good-guy drama kid, the "goth chick," the iron-sided Social Studies teacher. Her writing is always respectful but never obsequious. She often cites youth culture, from Minor Threat to Sir Mix-a-Lot, and narrows the age gap between herself (she's 54) and her subjects.

What is really going on in American schools is grim, and it doesn't necessarily take Burkett's book to understand that test scores are down and violence is up. What the book does is put human faces and characters to the grim reality. It accomplishes what the senior graduation speaker, Reilly Leibhalt, quoting the Dead Kennedys -- calls for his classmates to do: not allow themselves to "fit in like a cog in a faceless machine."