Thanks. So how good or bad are these alternative schools?
Not a bad solution. If they were removed from education completely it’d be pointless, since they’d be both ignorant and unempathetic - a dangerous combination in a democracy.
I think the parents should be allowed to choose between the year of alternative school, what’s behind Curtain Number 2, and what’s in the box. One contains a complete pardon and $5,000 in Kohl’s cash. The other… doesn’t.
Because it’s false.
It’s not supposed to be a real apology. It’s a punishment. And a life lesson. You have to learn to apologize even if you aren’t sorry. And it’s a way to make apologizing easier, so you get past the reasons most people don’t apologize even when they are sorry: they have too much pride or are too angry.
A parent apologizing does none of that. Making the kid apologize does all that, plus the same thing having the parent apologize does, seeing as the parent is making them do it.
And everyone crying about this being unfair: this is the fair solution. How it normally works is what’s unfair.
And, no, willingly taking abuse because you know you’ll get paid is not at all the same thing.
How should I know? I’m not an alternative school inspector. I’m sure some are good and some are bad. But they are schools and not Maoist brainwashing camps or whatever people were imagining.
From all the claims about the quality of public schools, the kids are better off in a Maoist reeducation camp. 
Except for the likely dead part.
Pretty hard life lesson for these kids.
Dying is easy, living is hard.
Public schools aren’t all one thing or another. There are great public schools and awful ones, just as there are excellent charter schools and terrible ones. The deciding factors tend to be who’s in charge and how much community/parent support they have.
In our (again, giant) school district, we have a variety of alternative schools for varying situations. We do have a high school for pregnant teens/teen mothers, but it’s not mandatory. It just offers more specific support for girls who have some pretty specific needs. A pregnant teen isn’t shunted away from the “regular” high school; it’s offered as a choice. We have an evening school for kids who don’t do well with the traditional school model, a mostly online school for kids who want to mostly learn from home, and two or three alternative schools for kids who just can’t seem to follow the rules in their traditional schools. One of these is along the lines of what I imagine these kids will be attending: a school for kids who have gotten suspended from their regular schools but who haven’t been adjudicated into the juvenile detention center. But we haven’t given ours a cool, 1984-style name.
If these kids are from an affluent area, I’d lay odds that their parents are frantically applying to private schools as we speak. And their kids will learn there that you can’t just act any way you want in a school you have to apply to.
Are these kids being suspended from school, or transferred to a different school?
I doubt they’ll even learn the lesson. One way or another, these entitled little bastards will end up not learning a thing.
those miserable worthless little shits make me glad I’m never going to be stupid enough to have kids.
Suspended. They’ll have the option to reapply to attend the Greece School District in 2013.
If they choose not to go to private school, the school they’ll likely attend is the Monroe BOCES Alternative Learning Academy.
Because she was a 68 year old grandma, and they made her cry. And she exhibited no authority.
I love how tough she’s been on these kids in the media, but she wasn’t even going to report the incident to the school authorities, in fact didn’t until people saw the video posted on YouTube.
I’m generally with you on this. However, the fact that she lost control, and lost her status as an authority figure, made her subject to bullying. Behavior that should simply have been children harassing an adult can be described as bullying because she lost her status. If you replaced her with one of their peers, you would have had the same type of mocking behavior, and the same type of impact on the victim, and we wouldn’t have a problem calling it bullying.
She should have thrown the little bastards one by one out the rear door when the bus hit 55 mph. But I suppose the police would have searched for something to charge her with.
They’ll go to an alternative school. They just can’t come back to that one for a year. They’ll get over it.
That’s an argument for implementing stronger responses at those “many schools across the nation,” not for imposing a weaker punishment in this case.
Bullying (and ganging up on someone who is an authority in name only, with no real power to impose disciplinary measures, *is *bullying) should warrant severe punishment.
Has it been determined that the bus monitor had no real authority and no power to impose disciplinary measures?