Homecoming Queen

[ZooFuzz]

WYFF4.com



http://www.wyff4.com/2006/0930/9968511_240X180.jpg (http://www.wyff4.com/print/9968387/detail.html#)

Video: Homecoming Queen Far From Her Throne (http://www.wyff4.com/print/9968387/detail.html#)
Homecoming Queen Misses Fairy-Tale Moment

MAULDIN, S.C. -- The girls and their fathers lined up in anticipation on the football field.
As many people in the stadium held their breath, the moment arrived.
"The 2006 Homecoming queen is Beth Clayton," the announcer said.
It was Beth Clayton's fairy tale moment. But she wasn't on the field, in the stands or even in the Upstate.
Mauldin High School's Homecoming queen is at Duke University Medical Center undergoing a bone marrow transplant.
Beth has a condition that is a precursor to Leukemia.
"She has never really complained about anything through this whole process, except for one thing and that was not being able to come back to school with her friends," Beth's father, Lonnie, told WYFF News 4's Erin Hartness.
Beth's mother said her daughter worried that her friends would forget about her while she was gone.
"But they have demonstrated that that is not true. They have really been very faithful and supportive of her," Bobbie Clayton said.
Friday night was proof.
Students roared with applause when Beth's name was announced. A friend accepted the empty crown box on Beth's behalf.
Beth already had the crown. Friends took it to her Thursday afternoon.
"She's always been an inspiration to be very positive and she always looks at the good side of things," said Kinsley Keels, one of the friends who made the trip.
Keels said Beth's struggle has taught her not to take simple things for granted.
"I think it makes everyone realize how much we really have and we should be grateful for what we have," she said.

Beth is expected to get out of the hospital on Monday and will continue treatments at Duke. She will not be able to come home to Mauldin for several more months, her parents said.

[cuebald]

Maybe there IS hope for the younger generation...

At least for those in one school.

[Captain Worley]

I think we tend to notice the bad and ignore the good. There's plenty of good kids out there.

[swampfox]

There are indeed many good kids out there. One of my problems with the school systems was that the good kids have to put up with the yet un-house-trained in their classrooms every day, all day long. Until and unless they make it into honors courses, where the unwashed may not enter.

But you should not have to be an honors student to be able to have classrooms that are not interrupted every minute by losers and gangsters. The administrators almost universally will not step in and do the responsible adult thing; put the trouble makers somewhere else.

There is already a law to back this up. Under the SC Safe Schools Act, it is a crime to disrupt a class in progress. Yet in many schools disruption is the norm, and boneless administrators will side with such BS as "that teacher don't like me" way more often than you would think possible. Under the SC School Crime Reporting Act, it is a pretty serious crime for school officials, and this includes teachers, NOT to report crimes that happen at school to law enforcement (whoever has jurisdiction over the location of the school), and to special offices created for this purpose at the Attorney General's office and at the SC Dept of Education. I have tried talking with people in all of these places, and they are just not interested. I was the trouble-maker. At the Richland County Sheriff's HQ on Two Notch, they let you fill out a form, and then that form always disappears. The only school crimes that get attention are the ones that they cannot keep out of the papers.

But the politicians who could do something about this situation keep getting re-elected over and over, and THAT is not their fault. So the real reason that the schools are the way they are is that the people of SC want them that way.

Maybe this is the fate of democracies. Lofty principles eventually turn to keeping up appearances and nothing else. What happens next? Well, for one thing, any trace of democracy disappears. We sit and watch our civil rights (not JUST from the Bill of Rights), disappear like smoke from a campfire, and we go to WalMart and buy something nice for ourselves and forget about the whole thing. (That money you just spent is on its way to China, by the way, still a repressive communist state that jails dissenters.) I didn't hear it myself when I was flying recently, but some people I know heard from the security people at a US airport that anybody who makes a joke about the security procedures will be arrested. Now I don't mind the security procedures. I am grateful for them. But I don't like not being able just to say something funny about having to take off my shoes to get on a plane. (Wear sandals when you fly. Saves time.)

OK, I rambled a little bit. But that's me. I tend to ramble. Ramble all over this land.

When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' man.