Posted on 09/04/2005 8:12:39 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
A few weeks ago my best friend's daughter Lea, who has been trained to call me "Tia" since birth, said something that bothered me.
Lea, a seventh-grader at South Park Middle School, is an honor roll student, a member of the student council, active in sports and, when she's not whining, an all-around good kid.
But she said that when she tells other kids where she goes to school they make faces and crinkle up their noses at her. Now, Lea has flair for the dramatic, made worse by a year of theater arts training, so I halfway dismissed the conversation as her being, well, dramatic. That is until Thursday.
I had the opportunity to visit an eighth-grade classroom at South Park, and when the teacher introduced me they asked if I was there to do a story because they were "the bad kids at the bad school." They weren't kidding.
For many years, the 78415 ZIP code and the surrounding area has been identified as one riddled with crime and gang activity. It's a stigma that has stuck, and one the children of the area struggle to deal with.
Maggie, 13, told me a story about a recent sports event where the opposing team's parents were talking about her and her friends. And what they were saying wasn't nice. Their teacher confirmed he had heard some not-so-nice comments himself.
"But they don't even know us," said Ryan, another student.
Ryan was sitting in the corner of the room. He was wearing a black sweatshirt with red flames and matching Converse. His hair was slicked forward in his face. He looked kind of goth, as my kids might say. He also had many of the answers to the questions his teacher had been asking only a few minutes before.
Maggie said hearing those parents talking about them, seeing the way they looked at her, made her angry. Maybe it was her paperstraight hair and dark black eyeliner that caught their attention. If they
Yes, this story actually ends in mid sentence.
People have seen what the gangs are capable of doing in New Orleans. It's time to rid them from every community in this country.
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