War Shadows School Near Fort Hood

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8425-2004Jan11.html

The class bell rings at Shoemaker High, and hundreds of students spill into the halls under a constellation of stars.

The stars are cardboard slabs of blue and silver, the school's colors, and they hang from the ceiling. On each is written the name of a student and, above it, a parent or other relative deployed in the military in Iraq.

Hundreds of these stars garland Shoemaker High's corridors, and hundreds more are stacked in boxes, waiting to be hung. Nearly 1,000 students, about half the student body, have parents, siblings, aunts, uncles or other family members serving in Iraq; so do many of the teachers and staff. Beginning this month, there will be hundreds more.

For Shoemaker High, edged by Fort Hood, the nation's largest Army base, the war is thousands of miles away, but it is intimate.

Some students are home alone because their lone parents have been deployed to Iraq. Others live with guardians or stepparents. When the father of a freshman girl was killed in October, the whole school mourned -- and feared what horrors might occur next.