From Tater Tots to TikTok: How Omaha Central High School Quietly Runs the World

Omaha Central High School, that red-brick leviathan squatting on 124 North 20th Street, may look like just another Midwestern monument to teenage angst and overcooked tater tots. Yet from the vantage point of anyone who’s watched civilization teeter from Jakarta traffic jams to Paris pension riots, the school is a surprisingly useful barometer for planetary mood swings. After all, when your building predates the Model T (founded 1859, if anyone’s counting), you inevitably become a filing cabinet for the world’s accumulated absurdities.

Let’s start with the architecture: four stories of Romanes Revival gloom that could pass for a medium-security prison or, if you squint, a regional branch of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. International visitors often ask whether the turrets are decorative or defensive—a fair question in 2024, when even Danish kindergartens install bulletproof glass. The sandstone walls have absorbed everything from the Great Depression (budget cuts) to COVID-19 (budget cuts with hand sanitizer), proving that while empires collapse, homework remains eternal.

On paper, Central is merely Nebraska’s oldest continuously operating high school. In practice, it’s an accidental United Nations. Between the refugee resettlement programs and Offutt Air Force Base down the road, the student body speaks more than sixty languages, including Dinka, Pashto, and a particularly inventive dialect of Gen-Z sarcasm. One day you’ll see a Ukrainian ninth-grader teaching a Sudanese tenth-grader TikTok choreography; the next, the Model UN team is debating Arctic sovereignty while wearing thrift-store blazers that smell faintly of ranch dressing. Somewhere in Brussels, career diplomats are achieving less.

Academically, Central has become a minor exporter of global talent—proof that even in flyover country you can still manufacture Rhodes Scholars and Fulbrights like artisanal cheese. The International Baccalaureate program, launched in 2008, now ships kids to universities from Cape Town to Kyoto. Locals brag that their valedictorian “speaks fluent Mandarin,” which sounds impressive until you remember that half of Shenzhen speaks fluent Mandarin and still can’t order bubble tea without surveillance cameras tracking their oat-milk preferences.

The athletic program, meanwhile, offers a darker comedy. The Eagles’ football team—state champions, occasionally—plays in a district where Friday night lights compete with opioid overdoses for parental attention. Visiting European exchange students, fresh from soccer leagues where fans set cars on fire for sport, find American pep rallies oddly wholesome, like watching ritualized warfare performed by caffeinated toddlers. They return home with tales of corn dogs the size of cruise missiles, inadvertently reinforcing every stereotype the BBC has ever aired.

Then there’s the janitorial subplot. Last spring, the school installed new vape detectors—sensitive enough, rumor says, to register a student merely thinking about mango-flavored nicotine. Administrators boasted the gadgets would “keep kids safe,” apparently unaware that students had already hacked the system by exhaling into empty Cheetos bags. If that isn’t a microcosm of global arms-control negotiations, what is? Build a smarter deterrent, teenagers will build a dumber workaround. Somewhere in Geneva, a nonproliferation expert is having an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

Of course, the building itself may not survive the century. Climate models suggest the Missouri River could relocate Central’s gymnasium to Council Bluffs by 2080, a migration that would finally solve the school’s overcrowding issue. The district’s long-term facilities plan, drafted in Comic Sans and last updated during the Obama administration, currently lists “strategic amphibious retrofit” under “future considerations.” UNESCO has not yet returned calls.

So what does Omaha Central High School tell us about the world? Simply that every grand narrative—empire, recession, pandemic, TikTok—eventually trickles down to a teenager texting under a 165-year-old staircase. The planet’s fate may be negotiated in glass towers, but the paperwork is filled out in fluorescent-lit classrooms where somebody’s still trying to forge a parent’s signature. Civilization, it turns out, is just detention on a larger scale. And yes, the Wi-Fi still doesn’t reach the third floor.