Give props to your best friend, thank your parents or quote Scripture. But your plan for a world takeover? Best keep that one to yourself.
An unsettling farewell message printed next to a Stanwood High School graduate’s senior picture in last year’s yearbook would not have passed muster at most other schools, advisers say.
Mark Robert Walker was arrested in Texas last week, accused of trying to send night-vision goggles and bulletproof vests to Islamic militants in Somalia.
In his “senior square” – a space for teens’ final thoughts in the Stanwood yearbook – Walker had written that his plan for “world supremacy” would start with a takeover of Somalia.
“(But) I should not divulge the exact details of my cunning strategy,” he wrote.
The quote raised eyebrows when the yearbook was distributed in the spring, but school officials dropped an investigation after learning Walker’s family had moved to Rochester, N.Y.
School leaders forwarded the yearbook to the FBI this week after hearing of the arrest.
Teachers at other schools say they were surprised the comment made it into print.
Students are “definitely censored,” said Dianne Johnson, yearbook adviser at Cascade High School in Everett.
In Everett and other districts, seniors are advised of the rules about senior quotes – no initials or code words, nothing in bad taste or threatening. Student editors review them along with their adviser, and anything questionable is forwarded to the principal.
Student editors are the key, advisers say.
“A lot of times, the kids may come up with the slang words that teenagers are currently using that are derogatory or inappropriate. I’ve never heard of them before, but the kids on staff notice them,” said Ray Johnson, an adviser at high schools in the Edmonds School District for seven years.
Stanwood Superintendent Jean Shumate said it was unclear why Walker’s quote was not weeded out of last year’s yearbook before it went to print. “I would not have allowed it to go in myself.”
Shumate and Stanwood High School’s new principal, Jan Schuette, met this week to refine the guidelines for the senior squares.
The guidelines are more specific now, so it will be easier for students to screen what is and is not acceptable, Shumate said.
Other schools have opted to pass on senior quotes because of the scrutiny required and the potential for missing something amid the stress of deadlines.
Margaret Johnson, an adviser at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, used to work in a California district where the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood was in vogue.
Some senior boys “put some very pointed messages in the yearbook that later were decoded,” she said. The boys had planned what to say, and when their comments were combined, delivered a hate message.
Sultan High School this year is moving away from senior quotes to paid advertisements, following the lead of other schools such as Lake Stevens, where parents typically buy the space to print childhood photographs and offer words of congratulations.
“The problem is to find out what really is inappropriate and what’s an inside joke,” adviser Jeff Brumley said. “Like, ‘that one time you got hammered’ – is that a big hit or tackle in football or they got drunk at a party?”
Schools that print senior quotes “do them with trepidation,” said Jackson High School’s Bill Trueit, who has advised for more than a decade.
So far this year, a quote from Winnie the Pooh is as out of the ordinary as Jackson seniors have gotten. “But it would only take one student to take that part out of the yearbook,” he said.
For schools that want to keep the tradition intact, however, and let seniors have one final say on life as a high school student, it doesn’t have to be complicated, Trueit said.
“You don’t necessarily need a very specific or detailed policy. You just need common sense and time” to review the quotes,he said.
The majority of students use the space as intended, the advisers said.
“A lot of our seniors give a lot of thought to that, because this is something they and their kids are going to go back and read,” said Johnson at Cascade High School.
Reporter Melissa Slager: 425-339-3465 or mslager@heraldnet.com.
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