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."

Comments

What do you expect?

[nharmon]

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?

Re:What do you expect?

[shadowfaxcrx]

Exactly. The real trouble is going to come when zero tolerance policies and cops mix. When I was in school (and it's still happening to day, a couple decades later) they had a 0-tolerance policy about fighting. If you got in a fight, you got suspended. Even if you got attacked, and stood there letting the guy punch you, and didn't throw a punch back, you got suspended.

Carry that forward to a school-police situation, and I can see you being booked on disorderly conduct, if not battery charges.

The whole idea is absurd.

As for taking away schools' ability to discipline our kids, that's bull. We've removed their ability to paddle them. That's pretty much it. They can still suspend, expel, detain, and in many other ways punish the troublemakers.

It's the *schools* that have failed in the discipline department, by applying these ridiculous zero-tolerance policies that are guaranteed to only be a punishment to the innocent victims, while granting a free 3-day vacation to the little shits that start the problem in the first place.

The answer lies not in sending the Brute Squad into the schools, but in schools being intelligent with their discipline. Habitual troublemakers are easy to spot. So quit giving them 20 thousand detentions and suspensions, and start expelling them. And, of course, get rid of the zero tolerance policies, which are really just an excuse for school administrators to not have to do any thinking when dealing with students.

Re:obviously

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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.

Re:obviously

[scottbomb]

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??

Re:obviously

[Captain Splendid]

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.