high schools being pressure cookers

In towns like ours where there is only one high school, almost everyone knows everyone. it's not hard for things such a rumors and gossip to spread around quickly. tensions between clicks can rise pretty quickly, luckily we haven't experienced much of that. but schooles like ours are more generic and offer almost every type of course out there, where as in cities, there are art schools, private schools, and other schools that are more oriented to one field of study. we get a larger range of students, with different interests and talents. but i don't think that our school is so much a pressure cooker as this article says, we have a fairly mellow student body.