What's going on at Oakwood CI?

By DALTON HIGGINS

As police and street crime units maintain their presence this week at my alma mater, Oakwood Collegiate, I'm sitting in my Atlas Avenue digs 10 minutes away contemplating this Columbine-style paranoia.

Last week, an ugly scrawl was discovered on a towel dispenser in the boys' washroom. According to press reports, it said, "If you thought Columbine was bad, just wait."

As chilling as that is, it's possible there's more to the story, and that someone is engaging in a little damage control.

A call to spokesperson Stephanie Bolton of the Toronto District School Board reveals that there was actually more to the missive. Besides a mention of April 20 (the day of the massacre in Littleton, Colorado) as one of the dates of attack, there was something else.

Bolton says she cannot confirm what that was. But I rapped last week with some students from the 'hood, and they swear that the unreported threat said that "niggers and Jews'' must die.

I couldn't find anyone who had actually seen the offending words, and there is such a thing as youthful imagination -- but would anyone make up something like this?

Amelia Golden at B'nai Brith's League for Human Rights says her group has received the same report and is now working to corroborate it.

If this case has more to do with hate crimes than with childish pranks, isn't somebody (read news media) supposed to inform me of this? Could it be that some facts of the matter are being obscured to protect Oakwood's proud reputation as a multicultural comfort zone?

Now the rumour mill is running overtime. A teacher at the school tells me the attendance of the black students in her class has dipped considerably over the past two weeks because of fear.

The Columbine tragedy, of course, means different things to different people. In Colorado, many wondered how it could have happened in such a wonderful, middle-class suburb.

There was, however, another narrative. It had to do with the Shoels, a black Columbine family who lost their son Isaiah in the shooting. They said they were frightened living in Colorado long before that fateful day because of the deep-seated racism there.

At the end of the day, the public at Columbine or Oakwood deserves to know the full story -- hate crime, childish prank or otherwise.

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