School Policy

by Beverly Tjerngren

The phrase "truth or consequences" always seems a bit off to me. In my experience, telling the truth is much more likely to garner consequences than to avoid them. In fact, isn't trying to get out of some consequence or other the reason people usually tell lies? It would make more sense, then, to talk about "truth AND consequences," wouldn't it?

When I was fifteen I got a big lesson in truth and consequences. I had worked as a crew member on my high-school drama department's spring play, doing make-up for their production of Bus Stop. At the end of the three-day run there was a big cast and crew party, to which I was thrilled to be invited. It was my first "real" party, held at the house of one of the cast members, whose parents were conveniently out of town. Booze was flowing freely--I cut totally loose and nursed a wine cooler--and the noise level was high and things got out of control fairly quickly. And that's when the parents made a surprise return home.

In the way of cowards through the ages, all of us revelers beat a hasty retreat and left our host to face the music. I guess the party probably continued elsewhere, but the thrill was gone for me and I made my way home. I had a feeling that news of the bust would get out quickly--our town was very small--and I knew that my mom would take much more kindly to hearing of my involvement directly from me than to getting it off the grapevine, so when I got home I went straight to her bedroom and woke her up. I sat on the edge of her bed and told her that I had been at a party that got busted and that I had been drinking. She told me to go to bed and that we would talk about it in the morning.

I did get my talking-to in the morning and things were good on the homefront. They were not, however, so good at school. One by one, everyone who had been at the party (close to a fourth of our three-hundred-member student body, as it turned out) was called out of class and summoned to the principal's office. My turn came in the middle of third-period biology.

I had been rather a favorite of the principal up to this point, but that seemed to have changed in a great big hurry. She said that she had heard that I was at the ill-fated party, which I admitted. She had also heard, she went on, that I had been drinking. I admitted this, too. Then she made me call my mom at work and confess my wrongdoing, of course not taking my word that my mom already knew all about it. After that was done, Madame Principal told me who had given her my name--two students who admitted to having been at the party but denied having drunk any alcohol--then gave me my own opportunity to turn informant. I respectfully declined, resisting her heavy-handed attempts at persuasion.

At the end of the day, of the nearly one hundred students who were interrogated by the principal, a grand total of two of us had admitted to drinking alcohol at the party. Perhaps not surprisingly, we were both "good" kids: honor students who were not part of the "in" crowd, who weren't key members of any athletics teams, whose parents didn't have any influence in the community. The thought that we two were alone in misbehaving was laughable, but that didn't make a bit of difference when it came to meting out consequences. We were summarily dismissed from all of our extra-curricular activities for violating the "activities code," while the rest of the party-goers maintained their spotless records as reward for being clever enough to lie and in the case of a few, to lie and to rat out others.

Undoubtedly the most deliciously ironic of the consequences was our expulsion from National Honor Society. In her conversations with my mother, the principal didn't even have the good grace to be embarrassed when it was pointed out that the only lesson taught was that lying was the way to go, and that if my comrade-in-confession and I had but had the wits to lie, we, too, could have remained among the "honorable." The honor society advisor, on the other hand, did see the injustice, and she cried openly when she gave me my expulsion letter.

Ultimately, this episode played a relatively minor role in my academic career. I suffered no lasting damage from not being a member of National Honor Society and I didn't lose any sleep over not being allowed to participate in the club's fundraising bake sales and car washes. And, in the end, I guess I did learn a couple of lessons ... though probably not the lessons that Madame Principal was out to teach me. I can only hope that, when all was said and done, she learned something about truth and consequences, too.