So it looks like the school funding protest was sort of a bust. But maybe that was a good thing ... after all, the number of students who skipped class to head up to the north suburbs was minimal - meaning that all the hype about massive amounts of students skipping class was just that: hype. What do you think?

How many school campuses have been shut down in recent months after a "threatening" message was found scrawled on a bathroom wall or scribbled in a notebook?

Most recently, 19-year-old St. Paul native Katherine Loberg was charged with two felonies after she admitted to writing "Be prepared to die on 4/14" in a bathroom stall at Saint Xavier University.

As reported by the Chicago Tribune, Loberg struggled with depression.

Mayor Daley and Arne Duncan, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, recently met with members of the Morgan Park High School Community Initiative to discuss to discuss concerns about safety, among other pressing issues.

Yet the school fared well last month when Chicago Magazine ranked the city's best public schools.

Still, recent crime at the school has drawn attention to it, most recently in this Web log post.

Chicago Magazine recently surveyed 233 public schools in the Chicago area on everything from graduation rates to racial makeup to standardized test scores ... and both the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences and Morgan Park High School fared pretty well in several instances.

Attendance rates, for example, measure students' desire to be in school. Although the Chicago Public Schools system has 94% of the most poorly attended schools, attendance rates at both local high schools -- while not stellar -- are in the top third.

The other day I came across the name of a possible former resident of the Southwest Side, and I'm not sure if there's a story in it or not, but I figured I'd check it out anyway.

A witness told police that he knew one of the victims --identified as 30-year-old Rodney Pepper--who was shot and killed Sunday morning in a triple-murder in Danville. The witness mentioned that he knew Pepper from a local high school, although Pepper recently had been living in Danville.