It would use trained facilitators, adults who are good with teenagers, to lead small-group discussions at 5,000 high schools throughout the country. But this administration dumped even global warming from the priority list. If solving the problem of kids and violence doesn't promote our national economy, I guess we'll just have to live with it, too. And we are. School shootings with fewer than five dead might not even top the evening news if Alan Greenspan made a peep that day.
Every good parent listens at the dinner table, if that meal is still eaten sitting down.
But that's not where kids reveal their anger and fear. They do it in poetry in their school notebooks or on their beds on the phone with a friend at 11 p.m. I wish all of us could read the poetry and hear the talk, to begin to understand what kids know that we don't, and what kids need that we might give them.