Students interviewed at a suburban high school in Northern California say they feel the impact of the Columbine tragedy every day. The school's new zero-tolerance policy has done little to change the rigid hierarchy that makes many kids feel like outsiders. Lyn Duff is a reporter for YO! Youth Outlook, a monthly publication by and about young people published by PNS.

ANTIOCH, CA. -- Deer Valley High School -- a racially mixed and economically diverse high school in suburban Contra Costa County--is a far cry from Denver's homogeneous Columbine High School. But a year after the shooting at Columbine, Deer Valley students say that event has fundamentally changed the way that students, administrators and the community respond to even minor threats at their school. What hasn't changed, they say, is the brutal high school hierarchy that many believe contributed to the events at Columbine.

"In my freshman year there were some fights," says Jason, 17, a Deer Valley senior. "Someone even picked up a board and used it as a weapon. But everyone involved just got suspended for a couple of days and that was it. It was looked on as kids fooling around."

Now, says Jason, the climate has changed. "There's no margin of error anymore. Just the threat of doing something gets someone expelled permanently. You're not allowed to lose your temper, and if you do, you're punished just as if you'd actually done what you were fantasizing about in your head."

Some Deer Valley students believe a recent incident in the cafeteria illustrates the excesses of a "zero-tolerance" campus climate. According to students, a boy was hit in the head by a quarter while eating his lunch. He accused some girls at a nearby table of having thrown the quarter and then, according to the girls, called them racist names. The boy was taken to the principal's office, and police were notified and came to the school. He was suspended and it is unclear whether he will eventually be expelled.

"It was just a little argument between students," says Roseane, a Deer Valley student, "but the administration blew it totally out of proportion."

Would the administration have reacted the same way a year ago?

"Hell no!" declares a junior who asked that his name not be used. "Principals and counselors are terrified of being held accountable for some maniac kid going off. They're overreacting and we're the ones who have to live with that."

For students who suffered from harassment prior to the Columbine incident, and saw their tormentors go unpunished, the new vigilance smacks of hypocrisy. "Beth," 17, says school has been a miserable and unsafe place for her since she was 14, because she is an out lesbian. The school's reaction to the alleged cafeteria incident, Beth says, "just shows that they care a lot more about liability than they do about the actual physical safety of their students. People have been making threats and calling each other names and hurting other students for years, but no one does anything about it until some white kids in the suburbs get killed, and then all of a sudden they respond."

"Until high school is made a friendlier and safer place," Beth says, "it will continue to create kids who want to kill the kids they go to school with."

By a "safer place," Beth doesn't mean a fortress surrounded by metal detectors and police; she means a place that's emotionally safe for students. That, say Deer Valley students, is something they are no closer to a year after Columbine.

"This school is based on stratification," explains Julia, a freshman. "There are a small number on top -- the wealthy kids, the very popular ones, the ones everyone wants to be like. Then there's most of the people, kinda mixed up there in the middle. And then there are those ones who are on the bottom."

Julia, who considers herself to be somewhere in the "low middle range," describes the "ones who are on the bottom" of the social scale as the misfits, the computer nerds, the geeks -- "the kind of guys you just know are going to grow up to be child molesters or bank robbers or something."

"Thomas," a 15-year-old "bottom" kid, agrees with Julia's assessment of the social structure at Deer Valley. "This is a cliquish school," he says. "Everyone has their group and they're trying to fit in."

Thomas is a computer nerd. He spends his time in on-line chatrooms (which is where the majority of his friends are), designs web sites for fun, and feels like a outcast at school, where his classmates shun him.

"I've just never been into what everyone else was," he explains. "When I was a kid, my idea of a good time was taking apart my Nintendo and putting it back together again. I've always been different."

Klebold and Harris, the Columbine shooters, felt different too, and that is something Thomas says he can relate to. "I can't go to school in peace," he says. "I walk in and people are in the hall, trying to mess with me. They'll come up and say, 'This person likes you and she wants you to ask her out.' I'll go up to her and she'll laugh in my face. I'm sick of it -- the names, the harassment, everything. I can see why (Klebold and Harris) snapped."

These are not sentiments that Thomas feels he can verbalize at school. "I don't want to get labeled as more of a freak than I already am," he says. "I don't want people to think that just because I don't have any friends, I'm some sort of risk."

With all the concern about preventing "another Columbine," it seems odd that kids like Thomas are left to feel as isolated as ever.

"Is it surprising?" Thomas asks. "It just confirms that schools and teachers don't really care about us. We're the difficult students that they don't want in their classes. We make them nervous, I can tell."

Thomas is nervous, too, waiting for the day that "I'm either going to be brought into the office and accused of something or they'll want me to talk to a therapist or something."

"People like me always get identified as the problem," Thomas says. "But we aren't the problem. We're just living the problem. It's not our fault that we're not popular."