End of an Error
Thirty-six years ago H.D. Woodson Senior High School was dubbed the "Tower of Power." These days? "It's a tower. There ain't no power."
Cover Story
“Mr. Scott! School’s on fire! School’s on fire!”
Robert L. Scott III, the harried assistant principal at H.D. Woodson Senior High School, doesn’t particularly want to hear these words. Lunch period’s just started, and students have clogged the halls outside the school’s gym.
Scott turns and looks at the girl uttering those words—some of the few words that offer its speaker no constitutional protection in the United States—and begs her to knock off the joke: “Please don’t tell me the school’s on fire.”
“Sixth floor! I swear on it!”
A lot of outrageous things get uttered in Woodson’s halls—“bitch” this and “fuck you” that—and just about all of that gets ignored by the folks in charge. They don’t have much choice—given the sheer volume, any one crackdown would bring entirely justified charges of selective prosecution. But “school’s on fire”? That’s one phrase that demands some attention.
Scott makes an about-face and heads back down the hall, trying to raise someone on his walkie-talkie who knows what the hell’s going on. Reports crackle in about smoke on the sixth floor and maybe the third, too. He’s headed to the building’s core, where he can ride the only elevator in Washington’s tallest high school to see for himself.
At the sixth floor, the door opens, and there’s an odd smell. Acrid. Not smoke exactly, but not a normal smell, either, even in a building full of unsavory odors. To the left of the elevator, a slick of oily yellow fluid creeps along the hallway’s tile floor from Stair 3, one of the four stairways located at the corners of the concrete tower.... Continued 
Issue of Feb. 22 - 28, 2008
News and Features
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- WILLIAMS EYEING HISTORY
Aug. 28 - Sep. 3, 1998 - The Big Takeover
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