It's 11 a.m., and Hillwood High School's cafeteria is buzzing with activity. Groups of chattering kids wander through the midsized room, which has double doors at either end connecting two wings of the building. Prefab lunchroom tables—the folding kind with built-in undersized benches—are full of students who talk, laugh and shove greasy cafeteria food into their mouths. The students come in all shapes, sizes and colors: black girls with highlighted hair, lanky white guys in T-shirts, olive-skinned girls who wear scarves on their heads.

It could be any urban high school.

But this is Hillwood, the West Nashville public school that last week led 6 p.m. news broadcasts and was splashed all over the front pages of the daily papers. Which helps explain why there are three uniformed Metro cops in this lunchroom, along with at least one assistant principal and a campus supervisor or two. Not to mention a 32-year veteran Metro principal brought out of retirement to serve as an advisor at Hillwood. And it explains why about once per lunch period—there are four because it's safer that way—a stocky black man named Karl Lang walks in, local news cameraman in tow, smiling, saying "Good morning" to every student he encounters and waving across the crowded room.

Like those at any school, the kids rush to mug for the camera.

You wouldn't expect such normal teenage behavior from a school full of hardened criminals and gang-banging terrorists, though. That's because the official story on Hillwood for the past couple of weeks has been a narrative of violence and chaos: the inmates were running the asylum. The facts, themselves casualties of hype, appear to be that on Oct. 6, a fight broke out that led to the arrest of 18 black students, according to school officials. (An unspecified number were given citations.) There were no weapons involved, but it wasn't the first outbreak at Hillwood in recent weeks. There had been other incidents—"large riots" as the TV news misleadingly put it—and a group of parents were concerned enough to appear at a school board meeting and notify news crews. The school was on "modified lockdown," which means doors were locked during class and no students were allowed in the hall for any reason. Cops crawled all over the place. A handful of worried parents refused to send their children to school for fear of violence.

Amid this volatile situation, Hillwood principal Alan Johnson threw a match. On Oct. 8, he sent a memo to parents and students titled "Update on the Climate of Hillwood High." In it, he discussed the recent discipline problems—blowing the arrest numbers out of proportion—and wrote that he was "not comfortable with the mix and number of students on this campus." People, including the entire school board, read the race code words in the memo, and some took umbrage at the insinuation that the "bad kids" were the ones bused in from mostly black neighborhoods in North Nashville, who didn't want to learn like the (presumably) "good kids" of whiter West Nashville.

It was a dumb generalization, even if every problem student at Hillwood were black, which, recent arrest demographics notwithstanding, by all accounts they're not. But this kind of thoughtlessness wasn't unexpected from Johnson, who has a reputation as a great academician with a somewhat aloof leadership style. And, some suggest, he was in territory he didn't understand: like schools director Pedro Garcia and several other top school officials, Johnson relocated to Nashville from California.

"Alan didn't have a clue about racial issues," one former Metro schools official tells the Scene. This official says Johnson brought an all-white group of students to represent Hillwood at a public function and last year had an all-white honor guard at the school's graduation ceremony. "He just doesn't see in terms of race."

But like it or not, the rest of America does, and has for a few hundred painful years. Stratification along too-similar lines of race, income and neighborhood is something all educators have to deal with. So Garcia—in what he called "one of the hardest decisions I've ever made"—demoted Johnson, a good friend and husband of the system's second-in-command Sandy Johnson. He was given a position as assistant principal at Overton High, a move that set off another round of controversy among Johnson supporters, who seemed to be mostly white parents and students. They accused school administrators of failing to support the outgoing principal's disciplinary efforts and started talking about "bad apples" and "kids who don't want to learn." At times, the racial overtones were too strong to ignore (though much of the media tried mightily).

Enter Karl Lang, the highly acclaimed principal of Cameron Middle School who's also gotten high marks from parents, student and teachers after serving at Stratford and Hillsboro high schools. Garcia introduced him as Hillwood's new principal in a town hall meeting last Thursday, and Lang didn't disappoint, winning over the crowd of parents and students with thoughtful answers and even a song. He pledged not to turn the school into a prison and talked about his "participatory leadership" style. And he said there were no such things as "bad kids"—it's just a matter of making them feel empowered at school.

Which brings us back to Monday, 11 a.m., and a noisily ebullient cafeteria. It's Karl Lang's first day on the job, and the two-way radio in Hillwood's front office crackles with his voice. "I'd like to report that the children in the cafeteria are just wonderful," he says for a reporter to overhear.

But it's clear that all Hillwood students don't behave wonderfully all the time. Students and adults in the cafeteria Monday said there are about 50 kids who cause trouble regularly, usually because one has disrespected another's "gang," one of several neighborhood alliances that exist throughout town. (Translation: they're not just in black neighborhoods.) These fights got more frequent a while back, students said, when T.J., a Blood, was shot and killed by a Crip. And when another Blood was shot, more trouble ensued. (These are sort of imitation Bloods and Crips, by the way, not officially recognized by the national gangs.)

It's the kind of trouble that pops up in Metro schools all over town—little things like a fight over a girl turn into gang battles. Some parents with children at other schools say it happens all the time, but only when a West Nashville school has problems does it dominate media coverage. And only then do school officials do anything about it.

Garcia admits that violence in a wealthy neighborhood earns disproportionate media attention, but he and other school officials insist the issue of discipline is one that's been on the administration's radar for a long time. The director, at a Monday principals' meeting, announced that he was abandoning his strategic goal of reducing the number of suspensions and expulsions in Metro. "Start nailing kids right and left" within the bounds of what's legal, he said to scattered applause. (Is it a little scary that he has to remind principals not to break the law when punishing students?) "We have to take control of our schools." Not surprisingly, Garcia wants his principals to take the uninspired approach of citing students for "sagging," the practice of wearing oversized jeans well below the waist. Never mind that if school officials ignored this fashion shared by gang and non-gang members alike, kids would probably start wearing clothes like the rest of us.

In any case, the discipline crackdown alone won't be enough, and school officials concede as much—at least, once they get the tough-on-crime sound bites out of the way. "We don't want people to fight at school, but if they still fight in the neighborhood they're going to bring it into school," Garcia says. That's why the district, as it attempts to find solutions to systemwide discipline problems, is also considering nonviolence training for principals and teachers, who would in turn train students to handle confrontations peacefully. "We need to get them to stop, period, and realize [fighting] is a stupid thing to do," Garcia says.

Besides mediation training, school officials know that turning so-called bad kids into good ones means making them feel a sense of ownership in their education. The process of building a relationship with students is one that takes a certain kind of leadership. "You wouldn't believe how excited high school students get when you can actually call their name out of 1,600 students," says one Metro principal. "With that approach, I'm pretty sure Karl is going to win over the 1,600-plus kids at Hillwood."

Leadership, then, seems to be the word of the week in Metro schools. And Garcia, despite some serious setbacks credited to his sometimes Machiavellian style, is learning to identify and empower good leaders. He's even learning to model participatory leadership, says school board member Kathy Nevill.

But as the Hillwood discipline fiasco has once again shown, he's got more learning to do. "Pedro messed up from the very first day because he did not understand the politics of race in this city," Nevill says. "And he still doesn't." Another source with close ties to the school system describes Garcia as "afraid" of the racial situation in Nashville. It's a common criticism of the Cuban émigré: he might actually believe America is a color-blind meritocracy.

For their part, the kids at Hillwood High School aren't weighing in on the matter. They're sick of all the attention—mostly negative—and want to go back to the daily business of high school. Homecoming is Friday night. School doesn't stop just because TV cameras show up.

Besides, as one smart-ass kid pointed out to a crew from Channel 4, they've got bigger problems than fighting. "Why don't you guys do a story on all our roaches?"