I graduated from Chattooga High School in 1980. It was a good school and to this day several of my closest friends are my former classmates.
That’s why the story I read this week had me shaking my head.
It seems the new principal, an ex-military, by-the-book type engineered one of the lamer stunts I’ve seen in recent years.
The principal, with the support of his superintendent, personally lopped four pages out of the schools yearbook because of pictures he found offensive.
So what were the students doing in those controversial photos? Drinking brown liquor? Bagging dope? Robbing a Kangaroo?
Hardly.
Mostly they were just acting like doofus teenage boys — playing basketball, mugging for the camera.
Maybe it was the fact that many of the boys were shirtless in the pictures that drove the powers-that-be into a scissors-slashing frenzy, but I’ve got news for them. That’s what boys do when they play ball.
Were they really good pictures?
Not really.
Were they artsy and classy?
Not so much.
Were they enough to justify an overly sensitive bureaucrat taking a blade to a $50 yearbook that was already paid for?
Evidently.
The publication’s contents had been OK’d by the yearbook adviser, since retired, who had been overseeing the yearbook for the better part of three decades.
He was OK with the photos and is angry that the book he and his students worked long and hard on was defaced by the current group of educational apparatchiks running the gulag school system.
(Note: For the record, the yearbook adviser is a former teacher and an old friend of mine. I have not talked to him about this story.)
This story reminds me of a few of my own scrapes in the halls of ol’ CHS.
We had a librarian who would take a pair of scissors to the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She chopped out the offending bodies of all the young ladies who dared to bare on the creamy white pages of America’s most popular sports weekly.
The weird thing is she wouldn’t just remove the entire pages or just pull the issue entirely, she would painstakingly cut out the offending photos, leaving us to grandly imagine what tawdry images they must have been.
This is the same librarian who later accused me of running a bookie service out of the library. I got sent to the office on that one, but assistant principal Fred Toney — yes, that Fred Toney, the former Southeast basketball coach and Phoenix High principal — laughed off the accusation.
Coach Toney wasn’t so jovial my senior year when I violated a rule that apparently the bosses took a lot more seriously than I realized.
Only a few weeks from graduation — after an embarrassingly incident-free four years of education — I was caught by “Coach” in the hallways ... AFTER THE BELL!!!
Apparently this was considered an act of anarchy by the higher-ups. Later, in the office, I was told to assume the position.
Now don’t get me wrong. I really liked and respected Fred Toney but something about that situation didn’t sit right.
OK, I was in the hall AFTER THE BELL!!!!! by about five minutes and for this — at age 17 — I was supposed to let a grown man whack me in the posterior with a wooden board.
Nope.
Not gonna happen.
After I declined to bend and grin, I was told that I would submit to the punishment or I would be going home on suspension.
“OK, I’ll go home.”
Coach Toney was not happy and loudly made it clear to me how unhappy he was. I still declined to be paddled.
That’s when the coach did a very smart thing. He sat me down and gave me a speech — emphasizing how personally disappointed he was in my behavior. It was brutal.
That speech was a heck of a lot worse punishment than a paddling would have been, and I left the office a chastened young man. (I also had to pick up trash after school for the next three days.)
It’s amazing the results that reason and respect — two-way respect — can have on a young person.
Better even than a pair of scissors.
Jimmy Espy is executive editor of North Georgia Newspaper Group. Also, you can visit him at Espysoutpost.blogspot.com
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