Bullying Taken Too Far

Through life, most of us are victims of bullying in one way or another but never in the ways Emma Graves Fitzsimmons describes in her article " 4 Teenagers Charged in Youth's Beating Death" in the New York Times. A 16 year old boy, Derrion Albert, was an honor student and football player with a bright future that wound up getting himself in the middle of a fight between two rival groups one day after school. On his way home, he happened to walk in the path of an intense fight where he ended up getting beaten to death by being hit with wooden planks and kicked repeatedly. All of this was captured from a distance on a video camera which led to the police identifying and arresting the guilty teens, Shilvonus Shannon , 19, Eugene Riley, 18, Eugene Bailey, 17, and Eric Carson, 16. He was not a member of either of the groups but just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The police have said that this fight he got involved in followed a shooting outside the school earlier that day. Derrion was the third student to get killed from the beginning of the school year at Christian Fenger Academy High School in the South Side of Chicago. In this area, over 34 public school students were killed last year from various violent crimes and at least 290 students were injured from shootings, which are said to be the most common crime. Because of this, school officials are starting an anti-violence and prevention program this fall which provides counseling and assistance for schools that are more likely to get involved in violence and eliminate the fear of going to school for other students. After reading this article, I had many questions like, if violence has been so bad in the years before, then why haven't the schools done more to help? How will these anti-violence programs help? Will they help at all? What more can be done to prevent these crimes? I think that they didn't do to much to help in years before because it might be too dangerous and out of control for them and needs to be taken into more extreme forms such as police help. Also, I think that if the people in these gangs talked to someone and got out their anger in a healthy way, then these crimes and deaths will go down. I think that in the future, if they had the funds, police could be around to do searches for weapons and to be there to break up fights, but I'm not sure if that would stop fights outside of school because the schools can't really do anything to stop what they do outside of school. This article also got me questioning my own safety here at Arapahoe. Is our school actually safe? How can we know if it is? Are there kids that go here dealing with problems to make them so angry to commit crimes? I think that Arapahoe is very safe because of the suburban area that we are in, but students can still have access to weapons and can be angry enough to do something that drastic. After reading this article and thinking about the safety of Arapahoe and all schools, I've come to the conclusion that we don't know what other people are going through in their lives and what they would be willing to do to relieve those emotions. However, we can do our best to help them out with what's happening to them and try to be understanding and take the proper safety precautions.