A Cry for Character: How a Group of Students Cleaned up Their Rowdy School and Spawned a Wildfire Antidote to Renegade Columbine

If could have been any high school in America Discipline problems were mounting. Sacred traditions were being ruined by vandalism and apathy. Maintaining order and control during assemblies was a constant struggle. The teachers were acting as disciplinarians and baby sitters rather than educators. At pep rallies, the students shouted insults at each other instead of focusing their emotions on a rival school. Cliques ruled, creating a class of angry outcasts that fought back by adorning themselves in black Gothic clothing and long coats.

The downward spiral mirrored what was brewing at a school a few states away in Littleton, Colorado. They were both powder kegs ready to explode. But this wasn't Columbine. This was Mundelein High in Illinois, a 37-acre campus that had its own cross to bear.

Mundelein's descent into educational darkness reached its nadir in the fall of 1996 with the crowning of its homecoming queen. The annual "apple pie" event dissolved into a raucous cat fight involving gallons of chocolate pudding. An alert newspaper photographer snapped a picture of the totally smeared queen and his editors placed it alongside the prim and proper images of girls from surrounding high schools. The community was, suffice it to say, appalled. How could a school's official homecoming assembly have descended into what looked in the morning news like something out of a Stephen King novel? Where was Mundelein headed?

As it turned out, not in the direction many feared. A group of juniors, fed up with the disrespectful, party-animal behavior of the out-of-control classes that preceded them, decided to take it upon themselves to turn things around. They demanded something truly shocking from their teachers. They wanted to be taught how to behave.

It was a bold and controversial request, but the teens would not be deterred. They fired up the entire student body, recruited a courageous teacher, hooked the football and soccer coaches, then hitched their wagon to the budding but equally controversial Character Education movement that's been quietly spreading across America.

And that was just the beginning. It was one wild swim against the politically correct tide for the kids in the white hats.

Here's a high school story that doesn't involve automatic weapons, pipe bombs, bloody hallways, drugs, date rape, pregnancies, tragic suicides, illiterate grads, or any other headline-grabbing horror of the late 20th Century. Imagine instead an intimate, but far-reaching story about nine students and their struggle to return to the concept of young people wanting to exhibit traits of dignity, class, and personal character.