Violence in High Schools:

A Special Report

How does this school manage to maintain such a bad-ass reputation? For some reason, which must surely be a mystery to anyone who actually attends the Woodlands, a lot of people who go to other local high schools think that our school is a hot bed of teen violence and gang activity. Students at some junior high schools are actually afraid to come here for fear, they'll be brutalised during our infamous initiation week, or that they'll get "rolled" for their brand new Hilfiger shoes.

Perhaps if you were listening to the CBC's morning radio program a few months ago, you might have heard our new principal Ms. Brayman trying to defend our school against it's undeserved reputation for violence. Despite the large number of Woodlands' students who listen faithfully to the CBC, our new principal's voice seems to have fallen on deaf ears. With a rising public hysteria about violence in high schools, our rep for violence just seems to get bigger and bigger.

If there is gang activity at the Woodlands, it must be pretty well hidden away. If you look hard enough though, maybe you can spot some signs. Cast your eyes amidst the sea of stylishness that is that Woodlands' student body. Have you ever considered the possibility that the initials "CK" on the those white sweatshirts really stand for "Crip Killer"? Could it be that those students you thought were just slightly out of style preppies, are in fact members of the notorious LA based gang the Bloods, and part of that frightful northward expansion by American gangs that we all read about in the Toronto Star a couple of months ago? Just wait until some punk kid comes around here wearing a pair of British Knights running shoes, things could get pretty ugly.

Have the people who believe this stuff about violence ever actually seen our school? Perhaps they haven't been here since the eighties, when according to various Woodlands' legends, the school was basically run by gangs of brutal skinheads, racially motivated baseball bat fights were an everyday occurrence, and if you wore the wrong colour shirt you might get jumped. Whether or not any of these stories are based on real events would be an interesting subject to look into, but regardless of that, these stories are certainly not true of today's Woodlands.

A big part of the school's problem is that many of the younger students actually seem to believe the hype. Seemingly accepting every wildly embellished story they have ever heard about violence at the school, a lot of kids who have come into the school lately seem to feel that they are coming straight out of Compton. Witness last year's problems with the Grade Eight Gang (see interview in HTP v3i2). Witness also the increasing popularity of 'Hoodlands' as the derogatory name for the school, replacing the old favourite 'Weedlands' (which is a more accurate name for the school, but hardly that distinctive - Man, a high school where the students smoke a lot of pot, there's only about 16 of those here in Mississauga).

Does the Woodlands really deserve to be on the list of the area's most violent schools, putting us in the same league as T.L. Kennedy, West Credit and Holy Name of Mary? Sure we may have had a few problems with people torching portables, smashing windows, and maybe the occasional fight or two, but no school is perfect. Most of the people who think the Woodlands is so violent have probably never been here, and are just basing their entire assessment of our school on a few wildly exaggerated stories. All the coverage that the media is giving to violence in schools probably isn't really helping this situation either.

I'm sure there are a lot of you out there who have no problem with allowing this inaccurate view of the Woodlands to persist. After all, you get all the benefits of having people think you go to a tough school (i.e. having everyone at Abyss think you're a bad-ass), with out the drawbacks of actually having to go to a tough school (i.e. being shot). But if some real gangster school ever decided to take us up on our rep, we'd pretty much be fucked. And wouldn't that be funny. But yeah, if all you kids actually want to go to a violent school, maybe you should start doing more violent stuff, and bringing guns to school and stuff, instead of just talking a lot of shit.