Q:Build a movie plot around this: What are students required to learn? Eastside High's school song
A:
In 1987, Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, is plagued with numerous problems, especially drugs and gang violence. Furthermore, the students scored poorly on the state's test of minimum basic skills.During the opening credits sequence, after a teacher is brutally beaten in the cafeteria for trying to break up a fight and the state legislature has recently passed a law proclaiming that schools that cannot meet minimum test requirements will be put in receivership, Mayor Bottman (Alan North) consults school superintendent Dr. Frank Napier (Robert Guillaume), who suggests the school hire elementary school principal Joe Louis Clark, aka "Crazy Joe" (Morgan Freeman), who was a teacher at Eastside High 20 years before, as the new principal. The mayor is reluctant at first as he knows about the trouble the radical Clark has caused in the past with his tyrant-like methods, but Clark is hired. Tension arises immediately when Clark dismisses from the school hundreds of students identified as drug dealers or abusers and troublemakers. A meeting between the parents of those students and the academic board only fans the flames as the parents side with their trouble-making kids, either refusing to believe that their kids are bad seeds or not caring about their kids actions (mostly because the parents were themselves troublemakers and bad seeds when they were in school). Clark refuses to re-admit the expelled students despite lawsuits and pressure from the parents.The next day, Clark runs into one of the expelled youths, Thomas Sams (Jermaine 'Huggy' Hopkins), who asks to be let back into the school. In a dramatic rooftop scene, Clark gives him a sharp lecture about crack and what can happen to Sams if he keeps on using it. Clark then dares Sams to commit suicide by jumping off the roof, but Sams, breaking down in tears, refuses and promises to clean up his act. Clark grants him a second chance to turn things around.However, another expelled student manages to get inside the school and attack another student...