Greenfield High School is not only the physical site where Than’s exclusion plays out, but it is also the stage foregrounding a wider landscape of structural precarity that intensifies the logic of contagion. In recent years, the town around Greenfield has seen repeated drug-related arrests. These events shape police-school relations and feed a climate in which school administrators must constantly negotiate between legal liability and limited resources.

Within that context, any student perceived as “risky” becomes a symbol of what adults outside school fear might spread across classrooms. In this atmosphere, the language the school used about Than—namely, “the student’s continued presence in school will have a substantial detrimental effect on the general welfare of the school”—resonates as a protective firewall erected against a fear of contagion.