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PROLOGUE The third week of the 2009/2010 school year was coming to a merciful end. It had been a week full of problems, headaches, and disasters. But that’s pretty much how every week is at Manual High School. Administrators were frustrated that hundreds of students still hadn’t shown up for school, or had shown up but immediately stopped coming, or were only coming occasionally. Day after day, teachers complained about students who cursed at them in the hallways, strolled into class late and left early, or threw fits that disrupted their classrooms. A few students in this school of about nine hundred had already been arrested or expelled for dealing drugs, having sex in a locker room, or threatening teachers. “Something’s in the air this year,” Terry Hoover, the school’s tough-talking dean of discipline, told me that Friday morning. “I can already feel it.” I had been at the school every day for the past three weeks, working on a series of columns for my newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, about the struggles and challenges facing failing urban schools. Manual was one of several such schools in Indianapolis, riding a graduation rate of only 39 percent, test scores that showed far more students failing than passing, and a poverty problem that cruelly gripped most of the students who walked through the halls. My embedment into Manual had been highly successful so far. At least that’s what I thought on that hot Friday afternoon as I stood on the steps overlooking the school’s courtyard and watched as hundreds of students raced to waiting school buses. I had written two front-page columns so far—one that exposed many of the problems that held the school back, from discipline and drugs to apathy and academic failure, and another that told of the struggles the school faced just to get kids to show up in the first place. The columns received a tremendous response from readers. Through dozens of e-mails and phone calls, they had told me they’d had no idea that the things I was writing about actually occurred in schools in the mild-mannered city of Indianapolis. They cringed at the tales of burned-out teachers and the stories xii prologue of students with profound personal problems. They were outraged and saddened by what they read and called for sweeping changes to the way schools are run. I was excited about the reaction and the work I’d done. It’s not easy to get complete access to a school, access that includes the ability to sit in on meetings with social workers and school police that are normally held behind closed doors, but I’d been given that access. Soon, though, before the first buses would roll away from the school that Friday afternoon, I would learn that I hadn’t yet come close to painting a full picture of what Manual was all about. My columns had exposed some of what was going on at the surface—in the classrooms, in the offices, and even in the small room that housed the four-person school police unit. But I hadn’t gotten to the heart of the school—in other words, the emotion and stories of the students, teachers, administrators, and others who made up Manual High School. Not yet. Emmerich Manual High School wraps around a grassy, tree-covered courtyard on three sides like a horseshoe. With sidewalks crisscrossing it and sculptures and plaques dotting it, the courtyard is the kind of idyllic setting you might find in many of the wealthier school districts within Indianapolis and its suburbs. It’s one of the nicest spots on the grounds of Manual, or anywhere else on the gritty near south side of Indianapolis that houses the school. But I had learned that students entered the courtyard only during those few minutes at the beginning and end of the school day as they made their way to and from the parking lot. It wasn’t always that way. For decades the courtyard served as a shortcut between one wing of the building and another or as a hangout during lunch periods. It was clearly designed to be a gathering place for students. That idea died more than a year before my arrival at Manual after a fight in which one student pulled a gun on another. School police had enough trouble patrolling the halls of the three-story brick building...

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