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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."
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?
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..."
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.
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??
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!
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.
I'm sorry I wasn't more descriptive.
This particular school was rural, and had a small student population. (My graduating class would have been 90 students)
Due to the small student body size, the school had to rely on extracurricular activites generating income for the school.
As a result, the school administration came up with some 'clever' solutions to keeping dumb as rocks kids that lived and breathed football academically eligable to play.
One such clever solution was the implementation of large group projects, where grades were given to the whole group.
Think:
Science fair project. Many students are supposed to work together to create an awesome team effort project. In theory.
In reality, the cliche smart kid does all the work, makes the project, sets up and tears down the exhibit, and writes the experiment reports. The other kids assigned coast on his/her hard work, and do nothing.
To add insuult to injury, and a point which further illustrates the true intent of the practice, is the percentage of the yearly grade that such group projects add up to. (In this case, cumulatively they added up to over 70% of the grade, meaning that as long as that smart kid keeps doing all the work, the freeloaders still get passing grades, even if they bomb all their homework and tests.)
That is how failing on purpose derailed the gravy train.