So Warwick is bringing the hammer down, as it must. Interesting. I suspect this one’s going to fester for a while - at last night’s meetings several parents said they brought racial incidents/comments to the district’s attention long ago, and nothing was done. That is an angle worth exploring, and I’m certain the papers here will do so. Because if district administrators really have been getting complaints - about these kids - for months and nothing was done, nothing was said, then that’s a major problem. You don’t ignore this sort of thing, especially these days - because it can indeed blow up into an incident like what happened last week. And had the district responded to the complaints sooner, maybe last week wouldn’t have happened.

I’m also curious that the district has decided to ban the confederate flag entirely. My first reaction is that this is an overstep, this is a free speech issue. But looking around, I see the courts have upheld similar bans, so even if this were challenged, it might fail.

You might have missed this, but in our one story last week it was mentioned that there was an eerily similar incident last month at Susquehannock High School in York. That school also banned the confederate flag.

A few of the kids’ MySpace sites we’d mentioned last week seem to have been deleted. Also, of you have the stomach for it - and I’m not going to link - there’s a thread about this incident on Stormfront.org. Where posters say they are “proud” of the confederate kids at Warwick; that even though minorities constitute less than 7 percent of the Warwick student body, that’s still too high.

I had always been under the impression that southern Lancaster County was the habitat for this stuff. In the wake of last week I’ve heard from lots of folks that, no, northern Lancaster County is at least as bad - Brickerville, I’m told, seems to be an epicenter of it. I don’t know this to be a fact; this is just what people are saying.

But it seems that these kids in Warwick weren’t considered - possibly by the school, and maybe by the community at large - to be abnormal in their attitudes. Sad to say, maybe they aren’t.