A fight after school in Florida leaves one middle schooler dead, and and his classmate facing a stark choice: a 10 year sentence for manslaughter or a trial for second-degree murder. The Ledger, a newspaper in Lakeland, Florida, looks at the background of the two boys. This troubling story of uprooted lives, absentee parents, racial tensions, illness and crime is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.
The role of the school in this story is limited to a single paragraph in which school officials say “it wasn’t a race thing. It was a kid thing, a pride thing, a turf thing. Fights are common in middle school.” The lives of these two boys are by no means remarkable by the standards of inner city youth. Thus the unasked question in this story: Do schools have a role in preventing events like this from occuring? What is the lesson to be learned here?
