Schools aren't like that here and if we weren't afraid of traffic, our kid would ride his bike everywhere. Since most kids bus to school in the city (for lots of reasons), not many get a chance to ride, though I know many who do. I think the bigger change was with the whole child abduction registered sex offender hysteria, and frankly, I think that is subsiding around here.

What we noticed raising our daughter was that when she graduated from primary school to middle school (6th grade) in 2000, suddenly she and all her friends went from being the presumed innocents to be protected at all costs from all the nasties lurking around into being assumed to be sexually promiscuous drug users. They couldn't use their lockers and had to drag their (ridiculously heavy) textbooks around with them because it was assumed that otherwise they would be dealing drugs in the school.
This was an upper middle class school in a prosperous university town that is notoriously left-wing. One of those towns that is referred to as the "People's Republic of" for being farther to the left than its surroundings.
The white daughter of the county sheriff had a brick that she painted a face on and dressed up and treated like a doll or a stuffed animal. It was totally cute. She brought it to school with her, because she was still at the stage where she carried stuffed animals around with her, and was suspended for 3 days for bringing a weapon to school.
9/11 might have made things a bit worse, but in our neck of the woods, this was all already in motion. The anti-drug fanaticism (utter hypocrisy in a town where most of the parents had smoked weed and many still did) and paranoia about pedophiles were the main obvious driving forces. That and an application of anti-racism that had the effect of extending constraints/attacks from lower class non-whites to middle and upper middle class whites, rather than extending respect and trust in the other direction.
Also, a rigidity had come into the educational system. So that no-one could look at that very feminine girl (she was not yet a young woman) and see how silly it was to call _her_ brick a weapon. A lot of our institutions have become less willing or able to take in feedback and much more rigidly defensive. I wonder sometimes, how far the rigidity of computer-centered systems leaks through society. And again, this was a notoriously liberal community.
And underneath it all, there was the insecurity and vulnerability that have exploded onto the scene with the Great Let's Pretend It's Just a Recession. A lot of folks there were a divorce or a loss of a contract away from not being able to afford to live there. And perhaps afraid that if their kids dropped out the way they did in the 60s, they wouldn't have the same chance to drop back in again.

Of my Small City/Big Town set in the middle of the country, but its not really that bad here.

Yeah, we do have some of the neurotic and overinvolved parents who won't let their kids outta their sight(I've known at least one marriage that ended in divorce b/c of this, about to know two). For the most part, our fleet of neighborhood kids rule the streets and yards until 9pm. Though during the recent heat wave, all the parents took turns allowing the fleet inside so as to allow them to stay cool.

Interesting thing though, this likely would not have happened without the freak hurricane that came through Louisville several years ago. Because of that storm, and the resultant power outage, it enforced a sense of community on all of us(I'd been living there for 5 years at the time and still didn't know all my neighbors). We all pitched in and helped each other out, loaning generator power so people could charge their cell phones, cooking out and sharing all the food before it went bad, checking on the elderly, that now we all know one another and our kids play together. This happened just as the kids were getting old enough to start playing together, so it just fell together.

Now, Spawn is about ready to head to middle school, and I've already heard complaints from parents about the security state imposed on them, and I'm dreading.

I also haven't seen so much of the compliance enforcement yet, either. Spawn definitely marches to the beat of her own drum, is considered a oddball, but this is found endearing amongst her peers, whereas I remember(from personal experience)that typically such behavior is punished by kids.

Good on him, but of course he doesn't include Obama among the neocons. Still, it's always fun to see rightists froth at the mouth.

Columbine.

*That* made the bubble of trust shift from students to guards -- lockdowns might have been present in some schools before it, but all schools, especially high schools, instituted them, after it -- because wasn't Columbine, as a meme, a jailbreak designed to kill hostages?