Our story last Sunday about a couple of boys temporarily suspended from South Albany High School illustrated the very difficult job school administrators face in navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.

On the one hand they’re charged with keeping order and maintaining discipline so teachers can do their work and students can learn in peace.

On the other hand they can become easy targets for complaints that they are insufficiently sensitive to the cultural backgrounds of some of their students, especially those belonging to ethnic or language minorities.

Any student or parent can walk into the public arena and say the school did this or that and it isn’t right and they feel aggrieved. But federal laws on privacy and student rights force school employees to keep their lips buttoned and be very careful when somebody — like a reporter, for instance — calls up and asks: “Say, what about this?”

In this case, the dispute arose over the wearing of a crucifix and a rosary, which the school principal, acting on information he had received, thought were being worn as part of possible gang attire. So he asked the boys to put them away.

Instead, the boys took offense and put up a fuss, which included coming to the newspaper with one of their mothers.

The story generated all kinds of agitation on our online comment feature, which is what you have to expect from anything that touches on as many hot-button elements as this story and situation did.

Some of the comments, most of them anonymous, contained wild accusations. Some were so out of line that I had them removed once I saw them. (It might be worth remembering things like manners and courtesy and avoiding innuendo and character assassination when commenting online.)

Imagine, though, how all this could have been avoided if the boys had simply done what lots of other people do: They wear their crosses inside their shirts.




Let’s switch to the lighter side:

You can spell “theater” two ways, and lots of people use both. The question is why. What’s the point?

This has been a small irritant for a long time. It was rubbed raw by the stories this week about the Whiteside in Corvallis, a former movie house that’s been dark for a long time and now is being donated to a group that wants to restore and preserve it.

A story on all this in our Corvallis sister paper this week used both “er” and “re” with some abandon.

The Associated Press style book is clear on the subject. It says to spell the word “theater” unless “Theatre” is part of the name of the place. But this creates the confusion you see in newspaper stories and in the general public.

There’s something overly precious, it seems to me, in the “re” spelling. It’s the British version. But so what? None of the theaters in the United States are British in any sense of the word. And “theatre” is no more elegant than “theater,” no more culturally elevated, no more worthy of support.

So what’s wrong with just using the spelling that is customary here?

You can reach the D-H editor at hhering@dhonline.com or by phone at (541) 812-6097.