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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."
Just this month, Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for taking a $1 million bribe from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as "kids for cash.". http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/08/11/national/main20091371.shtml
This can happen to your kids too! I am so sick of all of the "unique snowflake" crap from people on here saying the schools and state should be able to do whatever they want to my kids to get them "in line". We homeschool all of our kids, are extremely respectful to all of them and treat them with the same respect and dignity I want for myself. I will never send them off to be harassed by the state and turned into a tool for the elites or a cog in the wheel. They live their lives along with us in the "real world" and are charting their own course rather than the one defined by the government, political, religious and corporate sponsors of education.
I was kind of thinking the same, but with a different conclusion. This is a great way to teach kids to disrespect the law. 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.
I don't know what highschool you went to, but in mine I was carrying the math and science grades of 12 (yes, I said TWELVE) other students, year round, for YEARS.
I suppose it was pure coincidence that I had straight A grades, and that they were always the same 12 students, and also were the A-team football lineup.
Pure coincidence, surely.
When I would enquire about this fact, teacher after teacher would tell me that there was nothing they could do about it, and totally circumnavigated the issue.
Strangely enough, in my junior year when I had decided that I had enough of their bullshit and chose to get straight Fs on purpose, it was less than a week before there was a parent teacher conference. (Unscheduled, mind.) The teaachers gave the whole song and dance about how I was not living up to my potential, and the whole usual shool administrator song and dance-- but refused to listen to my grievances. Something my folks both noticed.
Prior to this meeting, and as a direct result of my decision to fail spectacularly, I had managed to make pretty much the entire A-team uneligable to play, had ruined their chances for athletic scholarships, and had literally received death threats in the hall.
As a result of this insanity (and the literal breakdown of my psyche from fun loving kid to cruel cynic in such a short period that had my parents frightened) I was taken out of school, obliterated the GED test, and stomped the local university entrance exam.
I loved college.
My grade was my own, and nobody elses, and I got to see first hand what happens to pampered highschool jocks when they get thrust into doing their own damn work.
I am now an engineer, working in aviation.
Don't talk to me about being a jealous nerd. Betty Big-boobs with her pompoms and Andy the dumb-as-rocks athlete that can't write his own name have nothing I want. I am interested in neither, for any reason.
And no, I never liked the "pretty girls" in science class. I found them painfully and willfully ignorant, and as such loathsome. If they and the deadweight athletes hooked up, they deserve each other.