In the past 24 hours I have received messages from all over the country, friends I attended school with, acquaintances who know my deep love and connection to Fern Creek and from countless others who just wanted to reach out. Fern Creek is in the news for all the wrong reasons. The school sent out a statement and used the term ‘Creek Nation’, a terrible cliché in this day and age where every group of people with an affinity to anything that binds them together consider themselves a ‘nation’. Fern Creek is not a nation, there is no Creek Nation, what there is and has always been is a community. We are unique in that as a sleepy suburb on the outskirts of town we have no town hall or town square. The focal point, the center of our community is Fern Creek High School. It pains me to see people try and change that. We try to seem better in some way by attaching the word traditional to our name, but we have never been traditional. I never once considered going to high school anywhere else. It is where my brothers went to school, my neighbors, and my friends. We grew up playing sports as little kids in the shadows of that building knowing one day it would be our turn to walk those halls. No one wanted to escape to some other place or attend a different school because as a community it belonged to us. There was not a shooting at Fern Creek High School yesterday regardless of what you read or heard in the news. There was a shooting in a building, yes, but in that moment the spirit and heart of my alma mater was not there. That terrible moment was the manifestation of a failed system. It raises questions that none of us like to ask. What was going on in that hallway? Do these young men even want to be in school? Are they contributing to their own education or are they simply being pulled along by a process that is afraid to recognize we are not equipped to reach every person? There is so much blame to pass around here, I blame the system that penalizes schools for students that fail, paralyzing teachers in a process that forces them to pass failing students on to the next grade forcing those kids into a deeper and darker place of constant struggle. I blame the process of high school education which naively believes that every student should go to college and pretends as if they are actually prepared. I blame the school boards who invest in everything from buses and diversity to outsized administrator salaries. I blame the state for forcing schools to accept students who don’t want to be there and forcing students to attend classes they don’t want to attend. I blame the parents for not raising their children properly but most of all I blame us all collectively for letting these things I just mentioned, happen on our watch. Fern Creek is not a nation, we are a community and yesterday was a terrible day but school is back in session today as it has been for nearly a century now. We are the alma mater of business leaders, university scholars, public servants, thousands of military veterans, professional athletes, actors, writers, journalists and tens of thousands of people who grew up in this community and went on to do great things all across the world, but will always call Fern Creek home. We are not one bad day or one terrible moment – we are and always will be one community.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 16:54:46 +0000
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