12:45 P.M. Faculty Meeting

By DAN GOODGAME

Two students approach an assistant principal and say a girl has brought a gun to school because she wants to scare a boy who continues to sexually harass her. The girl is in a class on the third floor, the student who may have been harassing her is not in this class, and the bell to change classes will ring in 15 minutes. What do you do?

The pep rally is over, and about 90 of Webster's teachers and administrators are in the library talking about two of the school's top priorities: keeping students in school--and keeping them alive. The "girl with a gun" scenario is part of an exercise in crisis management--and is based on an incident that happened at the school five years ago. Teachers split into groups of nine to draft a response to various emergencies.

"A phone caller says a bomb will explode somewhere in the school at 10 a.m. It is now 9:30. The person calling sounded like a teenage male, and it sounded as if two other teens were laughing in the background. The caller hung up before giving any other information. There is a trace on the call, and police are investigating. This investigation will take more than half an hour."

A team in the northeast corner has been assigned the bomb threat, which actually happened more than a year ago. The school was evacuated, but search dogs found no bomb. Police did, however, catch the boys who called in the threat, one a Webster student, who was expelled. It gets the teachers talking about security in general--and Columbine in particular. "The bombs at Columbine were planted beforehand, at night, when there wouldn't be any witnesses," says Ken Winingham, who teaches psychology. "Our school is wide open at night. If you want to plant a bomb here, you can." But the team can't agree on any new restrictions on access. They suggest the school install a caller-ID system, but principal Voss says it would cost "a full teacher's salary for a year."

Instead, this very day, phone technicians are installing equipment that will make it easier to trace calls coming in to Webster High. Earlier in the day, Voss asked the school's maintenance chief, Frank Schaffer, to post two employees on the roof whenever the school has a crisis evacuation or drill. "I'm worried about that situation in Jonesboro, where the kids with guns shot the other kids as they were leaving the building for a fire drill," she said. "It would be good to have someone on the roof to make sure it's safe to leave."

As for the other preoccupation, keeping students in school, the teachers know how much pressure the administration is under. Last year Webster Groves received $150,000 in extra funds from Missouri's A-Plus program, whose top goal is to reduce the dropout rate. Webster's rate has declined from 3.9% to 1.3% over the past five years, but needs to stay down to keep the state funds flowing. So the school has compiled a list of 150 students considered highly "at risk" of quitting, and is targeting them for extra attention. Everyone agrees that this effort is admirable--and necessary, given the school's $1.2 million budget deficit. But there is no discussion here of teachers' private complaints: that one result of the focus on keeping 150 kids from dropping out is a lowering of standards and expectations, not only for them but for all the other 1,180 students.

--D.G.