May 3 to May 7 was Random Acts of Kindness Week at C.V.R.  Thursday afternoon, the entire school, students and staff included, headed out to the football field to create a human chain.

Why?

Since April 20, many violent acts have been committed in high schools throughout North America.  The most talked about is the mass murder in Littleton, Colorado.  On Hitler's 110th birthday, two senior students at Columbine High School proceeded to kill anyone they did not like: jocks, blacks, Asians, preps and the religious.  Just before 11:25 AM, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold approached the school parking lot dressed in masks and black trench coats where they shot a girl and a boy.  Next they entered the cafeteria, opened fire, set off a bomb and threw a second one on to the roof.  Meanwhile, students and teachers tried to save their lives by hiding in closets, bathrooms, and even the ceilings.  Classes barricaded themselves into their rooms by piling desks, chairs and filing cabinets against the door.  Students used their cell phones to call for help and tell their families how much they loved them . . . one last time.  The murderers were still making their way through the school.  Near a stairwell, they shot a teacher who was trying to save his students.  Once in the library, ten more teenagers were killed before they turned the guns on themselves.

A little over a week later in Taber, Alberta, a farming community of 6000 peoples, another student let loose.  At lunchtime on April 28, a 14-year-old boy, a grade nine dropout, shot two students at W. R. Myers High School.  Jason Lang, 17 years old, was killed.  His best friend, also 17, is soon going under a third operation to remove the bullet from his spinal cord.

The same day in Lancaster, California, three teenage boys were arrested before they allegedly planned to blow up their high school with home made bombs and hand grenades.

Two days later, on April 30th, a 16 year old boy attending Sir John A. MacDonald High School in Timberlea, N. -S. was caught with the possession of explosives and the documents on how to build them at school.  He will soon be going to court.

Also on April 30, at a high school in Grand Falls-Windsor, NFLD, there was a rumour that someone had brought guns and bombs to school.  Administration acted quickly and closed the school.  A thorough investigation that took place over the following weekend concluded that no weapons were present.  The school was reopened Monday.

Monday, May 3, in Glace Bay, N. -S., a 16-year-old boy was arrested for making a bomb threat to his high school.

In Drummondville, QC on May 5, a 14-year-old girl pulled a knife out in the middle of class.  She then stabbed a female student twice.  The suspect is under arrest, and the 15-year-old victim is slowly recovering.

The following day, in British Colombia, a 15 year old boy was arrested for the possession of twenty-four guns, six knives and a list of his classmates, that were all found in his home.

Throughout that week, multiple violent acts were committed in the province of Manitoba.  Six students, aged 13 to 14, were charged of threatening teachers and students, and to blow up their school.  At General Wolfe High School, another student, after arguing with a teacher, threatened to return to school with pipebombs and other weapons.  A teenager from Elmwood High School also planned to shoot a teacher and blow up the building; a similar case happened at the Pierre-Radisson Collegiate.

The crimes did not cease after our Random Acts of Kindness Week.  May 13, in the same small Newfoundland town of Grand Falls, a live bullet was found in a hall of the local high school.  In other municipalities of the province, such as Corner Brook, more instructions on bomb building were discovered and there were numerous counts of assaults and bomb threats.  Also, a 15 year old boy from Carbonear, an outcast always wearing black clothes and whose only friends were in chat rooms, threatened to use bombs at school.

Exactly a month later, on May 20, 1999, someone else decided to copycat the Columbine murders.  In Conyers, Georgia just after 8:00 AM, a male sophomore armed with a rifle and handgun shot six students. None of the Heritage High School students suffer from life-threatening injuries.  The gunman is presently
in custody.
 

Perhaps most of these evil acts ended harmlessly, but there were simply too great in number.  Some of you probably think nothing like that could ever happen here, right?  Wrong.  This is not just an American thing or a big city thing; over 80% of the examples I mentioned took place in small Canadian towns.

There is a point I neglected to mention earlier.  In most of those crimes, the suspects were outcaste students.  They were the ones people teased and laughed at, the ones who did not fit in or were not part of a “social elite clique”.   Unfortunately, such cliques exist in every high school, including C.V.R.

This is one of the reasons we came together that Thursday afternoon.  The human chain gave us a chance to erase and forget the cliques and the grudges we hold against one another, and unite.  We should try to accept each other for who we are and try to maintain the peace we experienced that day to prevent such a massacre from ever happening here, in the Chateauguay Valley, at our small, innocent C.V.R.

I do not need to insult your intelligence by stating television does not kill people; guns kill people. However, we have insulted our own intelligence by thinking we can live surrounded by violent images and stories without coming to harm.

Don't you know? In real life nobody dies before being shot at least 50 or 60 times. Or that they die at the end of each day only to return, alive and well for the next. We have come to a point where violence on television is not an offensive abnormality but a given. Just stop, when you're sitting half-comatose in front of the talking box, and think about what the characters are doing.

-The average person watches 3 hours, 46 minutes of television per
day. By age 65 that's nearly 9 years glued to the tube.
-Number of violent acts the average child sees on television by age
18: 200 000
-Number of murders witnessed by children on television by the age
of 18: 16 000
-Percentage of children polled who said they felt "upset" or "scared"
by violence on television: 91

It is said "art imitates life". If this is art, then take a look at our lives. When
someone is senselessly massacred on television, as a
reflex action, we push it out of our minds. It is a survival instinct.
We see it so often, it becomes a common image.

Stop the violence. Stop watching TV. We, as teenagers, are
important to television advertisers and movie makers because there
are many of us, we watch a lot of television and we have power as
consumers. So if we stop watching violent television shows and
movies, they will pay attention. Stop the violence, stop watching
TV.
 
 

Our society is decaying

Our society is decaying at a slow but steady rate. There are so many causes we can’t explain begin to start to stop. A lot of bad things happen in the world that no one is proud of. Matt Lauer (The Today Show . ) once said “ There is to much bad news and not enough good news in the world.”. This can only mean one thing that the world needs one good wake call to help straiten it out. And lets not forget that what we do can be imitated by children who what to be like us and even though imitation is some times the highest form of flattery it can be a bad thing as well.

One of the causes are stereotypes people who judge a person for they look like and act, what they do, what’s their ethnic background. The one I see the most of in CVR is what people do.

 If so one is does something different then everybody else that person will be taunted and humiliated in front of the class, beaten up or pushed around because they reported an act of violence inflicted on them. In some cases the person who is being hurt will inflict violence with deadly force to stop those who are making the person feel bad. Like in Colorado the school’s “outcasts” as they were called shot other students because they picked on them.

 Another reason is the wrestling industry like WWF, WCW, and ECW . Their entertainment promotes vulgar language and violence. Even though it is acting,  younger and more aggressive people love trying to duplicate the moves. This causes savoir or deadly injuries among children and teenagers. If people don’t
realize that this is dangerous stuff their messing with .
 

 War is the most serious cause of all. All countries have armies that recruit people to teach them how to kill other people that they know nothing about except that their the enemy and that they need to be destroyed. Countries go to war for sometimes for stupid reasons and others for reasons that are good and noble.  But still innocent people are killed that don't care that the war is about as long as its  stop . Even though we try to promote peace we always are at war with some other country.

by Kevin

Is CVR sinking into the earth?   A few years back, I decided to get the true facts about the school’s architectural condition. 

With the help of Mr. Ireland and Mr. Ward, CVR’s construction carpentry instructors, I was able to borrow the proper equipment to study the school without leaving the premises.  My assistant and I were lent a laser level to measure the different heights of the floors in CVR. To my surprise, I found that the upstairs floor is reasonably level, but the downstairs floor is like the cross-country trail, with bumps up to 5 centimetres high in it!  This proves that the columns and exterior walls are really very stable, but that the concrete slab under the school’s ground floor is shifting with time as the  clay below oozes.  All this action is taking its toll on the floor and interior walls downstairs, which  are cracking and crumbling.  Different parts of the school move at different times and so the pressure builds up, raising and lowering the floor between the columns,  kind of like theearth’s crust and it’s tectonic plates.  Eventually something breaks.  Last year the glass in one of the main showcases in the lobby shattered during open house, but luckily no one was hurt.

     As it turns out, the school is not really sinking, the ground floor is merely moving and shifting a lot.  Perhaps sometime in the future the floor and walls on the first story will have to be torn out and totally reconstructed, but for now, we can only watch our step!