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When Schools Are the Police
First time accepted submitter Is Any Nickname Left writes "The Washington Post has an article on school systems with their own police forces. It focuses on Texas, which has the highest number of 'School Police Departments,' of which there are so many they have their own trade association. Highlights: 1) Houston fourth-grader stood on a stool so he could see the judge. He pleaded guilty. To a scuffle on a school bus. 2) 275,000 juvenile tickets in fiscal 2009, to students as young as 5. 3) Austin middle school student ticketed after she sprayed herself with perfume when classmates said she smelled. 4) a 17-year-old was in court after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other. 'She was mad at me because I broke up with her,' he said. I waiting for the Alamo Heights Special Airborne Brigade and SEAL TEAM CROCKETT."
Fuck the police
You cannot teach someone when they are not willing to learn. If a child doesn't want to learn they should be expelled from school and given working papers. Why punish those that are there to learn with disruptive people?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
You have (rightly or wrongly) taken from the schools a lot of their powers in regards to disciplining students. So where the school can not, the parents must. Except, the parents are not fulfilling their obligations in this regard, and the schools can not hold parents thusly responsible.
But the courts can.
Therefore, the school will begin referring your unique snowflake to the courts when their behavior exceeds what little remedies you have left available to the schools.
Did nobody see this coming?
It is indoctrination, the inculcation of the reflex to knuckle under to petty authority. Pedagogy takes a distant second to this primary urge.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Police State training. When our generation are dead and gone, you will have this younger population come after us, raised in this invisible cage.
Go watch Brazil, again.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Blame the helicopter parents and their ravenous lawyers. Grab a kid to break up a fight? Law suit. Yell at a kid to break up a fight? Law suit. Make a kid feel sad for any reason (little johnny just wanted to stab someone, is that so bad?)? Law suit.
There's a serious lack of law in a state where a school needs to run their own police force.
There's a serious lack of public moral in a state where voters allow the previous two issues to exist.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
"Forced education" has given most industrialized nations literacy rates far in excess of 90%. Stop talking hogwash. It strikes me that your lack of rational powers may in fact be a sign that you are a victim of a terrible education, or possibly terrible genes, or possibly, you're just a self-important moron.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What is this? (Up until recently) Libya? North Korea?
When you have to put police in the school permanently then that's not the foundation for a civil society. It's a symptom of a serious societal problem. If children are taught that all disputes are solved by calling in the police and sitting in front of a judiciary, then how the hell are they going to learn their own negotiation skills, or that all disputes don't have to be solved with police / lawyers? It's like a fricking indoctrination into a 100% litigious and incarcerated society of the future. Oh, look, we see from your record that when little Jimmy was 6 he used the word "poop" in class, and when 12 he broke a bottle in the school yard. Oh, and then when 16 he failed to put a milk carton in the proper waste bin. When 17 he gave someone a wedgie. By 18 he drove the wrong way down a one-way street, and his life of crime only worsened from there. It's a shame. He had such a bright future when he was 5. So few of our kids today manage to keep a clean record. What is the world coming to?
Get a clue. Kids make mistakes. They make stupid decisions. They sort them out. *Sometimes* adults have to be involved because the events are serious, but for the vast majority it's innocent, stupid mistakes from which kids eventually learn better. Hand-holding them through a formal legal process of resolving disputes does not help them learn, especially when that legal process doesn't always get things right (it isn't perfect).
(10 years later) Don't like the fact that your neighbor's tree branch happens to dangle over your lawn? Don't bother, oh, actually talking to them. Just talk to your lawyer and send a letter demanding they remove the tree branch overhanging your property, and threaten to sue if they don't. After that, if they don't comply, call in the police. Never mind the insane costs to all taxpayers to settle everyone's petty little personal disputes. Never mind the lack of simple courtesy to try to solve problems. Just lawyer up and solve it that way, all the while paying the lawyers their cut and letting the costs of justice and police forces expand exponentially.
Yes, real violence happens in schools. Yes, real crime happens in schools. But for god's sake restrict the police and justice system's dealings to those matters, not fricking perfume spraying or intentionally spilled milk! Empower teachers and administrators to be able to do something without getting the legal and policing system involved. Police have better things to do, like catching real criminals and bringing them justice. I suppose you could justify this effort as a kind of education in civics, but in the real world you don't manage every dispute with formalities, otherwise government would have to be HUGE. I mean, look at this:
"documented 275,000 juvenile tickets in fiscal 2009"
275000 tickets in one year? How much did that cost? Is the state trying to make revenue on this? Or what? It's ridiculous. It's like a big tax on student mistakes, which is unavoidable. Students are *supposed* to make mistakes. They're not adults. Not to mention that I would guarantee that all the police officers and politicians currently in power would probably have a lengthy "school crime record" if something as insane as this was implemented in their day. And how comfortable would they be with that information being somewhere in a government database today? Probably not.
What a foundation for future generations the people making these decisions are building. It's appalling.
And at the other extreme, I have heard news stories about: A kid gets arrested for having a butter knife in his lunch box. A kid gets busted for possession of Tylenol. Another kid gets in trouble for sharing cupcakes. Kids getting sanctioned for holding hands in the hallway. The schools crack down so hard on these miniscule infringments that they MAKE THE NEWS. With schools worrying about all this crap, we wonder why they're not learning to read and write??
The best indicator we have of success is education. You will either provide decent education (note, this isn't warehousing, baby sitting, crowd management, or child processing, but education) or you will pay for a significant percentage of your population being incarcerated, and your economy being in shambles.
Time and time again, the very same children failing in public school environments, have excelled when placed in legitimate institutions committed to providing a safe, comprehensive, committed environments for children to learn. The failure is not in the children, it is in the public schools. The list of failures is nearly endless. Providing so little funding that schools resort to having fast food on their campuses leading to unhealthy diets high in sugar and fat, leading to poor physical and therefore mental performance (exacerbating attention disorders and chronic sleepiness in classes.) Insufficient funds for meaningful PE, art instruction, music instruction, computer science instruction and extracurricular activities make students less interested in their course work and curricula, provides them with insufficient opportunities to develop healthy social behavior, and in poorer communities where both parents work to feed their families, leaves children vulnerable to gangs and negative influences (those drugs mentioned above.)
Children are naturally curious and want to know. It takes an environment of trying to force kids into being the little automatons that governments and businesses so desperately want in their workforces and electorates to kill off the desire to learn. The state isn't interested in intellectually developed, informed and empowered civilians. Such people are a nightmare for Government. They have opinions and know how to voice them, they see trends and make informed conclusions and demand that their representatives tow the line. Government hates that. Much better to create an ignorant, superstitious public who get's their truth out of the little black corporate box in their living rooms and does what Fox news tells them to.
I agree there is a small percentage of special needs children, children acting out because they are being raised by monsters, children with medical conditions which make it hard or impossible for them to function normally in a class room. These children for the most part need special education to succeed, but significant information now available says that they indeed can lead productive, happy, contributing lives giving to society rather than simply taking. Until we're willing to spend as much on our children (as a society) as we do on pets, none of this should be a surprise. Over the last 3 years we secretly gave 1.2 trillion dollars to banks (half of them in other countries.) We've lined the pockets of wealthy and greedy men, and continue to do so. Our representatives refuse to tax the wealthy, while Rupert Murdoch stood up in public and said "FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, TAX ME ALREADY!!!" Our schools just look like the rest of the train wreck, that's all.
Texas does lead the way in stupid however. Their government has been hijacked by the profoundly ignorant, and they're demonstrating what the decent into a police state looks like. Don't deal with the underlying causes long enough, keep addressing the symptoms, keep using magical thinking as your foundation for making decisions, all the while hoping the messiah will magic all your problems away, and you get Texas. The real problem is that a very large number of poorly educated people in this country think Texas is the model for the nation, and it scares me to bottom of my soul.
Punishments are much more frightening before you've experienced them. All this will do is trivialize getting in trouble with the law, and show kids it's not the end of the world. As someone who's spent his share of time in prison, I know it made me much more willing to bear that burden again if the cause was right.
Mod parent up. I used to do and think exactly that way as a kid. Once you've been punished a few times, it loses a lot of its power and instead of being avoidance therapy, all it does it give you a very granular lesson on risk vs reward.
Plus, the minute you get labeled as one of those kids, you end up getting punished without offense fairly easily, so there's definitely a mindset of "If I'm going to do the time, might as well do and enjoy the crime."
Apart form letting parents abdicate any and all responsibility for their children, the worst mistake we've ever made in this regard is treating kids like retards and cattle. Just because you're 10 doesn't mean it doesn't affect you and change you like it would an adult treated the same way.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
It is NOT lazy teachers, you self righteous asshole.
It is parents like yourself who do not raise their kids to have respect, that are a problem. When parents sue the school for disciplining their kids, when parents refuse to discipline their kids, and when parents refuse to support teachers; then what do you expect to happen.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Rupert Murdoch? Did you mean Warren Buffet, or did I miss some interesting news?
Yes but the police will often get the benefit of the doubt. Or in some areas they are just untouchable. Suing a teacher or a school is much easier.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Isn't it a good thing we have money for the police state but not for a lower student:teacher ratio?
If we herded all the students into one giant room, think of the cost savings, one teacher per room, no need for administrative staff and such. Just cops ready to write tickets (and generate revenue).
"Can someone explain to me, why the USA is so violent?"
It's hard to understand, isn't it?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Can someone explain to me, why the USA is so violent?
Are you being snide? I should kick your ass for that...
As an inhabitant of the USA, I think the biggest problem is the strong individualistic streak that we have. It seems like there are a lot of people who just get caught up in things and don't think of anyone but themselves, and culturally this is being reinforced. They want to be involved in everything, be the center of attention and have the world revolve around them. Short sighted people want immediate gratification and respect, and fuck you if you don't give it to them.
Most people here aren't like this though, just enough to make the rest of the world think we are a bunch of violent, impatient jerks.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Can someone explain to me, why the USA is so violent?
A few thoughts: Culture clashes from a melting pot of immigration, anti-socialism sentiment leads to poverty for bottom of society (and hence violence), a culture of accepting violence but not sex/drugs (think in terms of censorship - television, supreme court rulings, can't sell sex toys in Alabama, not enough escapism for some people, etc.).
Probably more... you could write a PhD thesis on this question.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.