I’ve been reading the Washington City Paper for a quarter-century. During that time, the best of D.C. public schools may not have gotten any worse, the worst any better, and the demographic only different, in being just a little less Anglo.

So, your readers assume, as is likely true, that the incident reports in the weekly Hall Monitor feature are, by the odds, about students, parents, security personnel, teachers, and school administrators, all black, and all caught up in dysfunction made to seem constant and chronic from your weekly sampling and repetition. Do you publish News of the Weird for racial balance?

That there are incidents as administratively awkward as badly drawn and overlaid tattoos shouldn’t surprise. That they must be recorded for the protection of all involved is an administrative necessity. But they’re no more worth narrating than, say, the weekly sexual frustrations, disappointments, and newly discovered venereal lesions of your (mostly white) clubbers. Wash hands and shorts, get an antibiotic dose, and make the same mistakes again next week, without publishing your sorry blogs about it, white people.

And give Hall Monitor a rest. A long rest. (Yeah, I have two kids in D.C. public schools.)

Foxhall Village