California Schools not allowed to ban students, your opinion?

It seems to be more of an op-ed, at least to me.

Wouldn’t a child like the ones you describe in the 2nd paragraph belong in an MR/DD program?

I have a relative who was homeschooled for much of her elementary grades because she would have meltdowns that were not only embarrassing to everyone involved, the other children were not safe around her. She did not attack other children, but she could shot-put a desk across a room. :frowning: It’s taken a lot of therapy and tweaking her medications to make her into the wonderful young woman she is now.

Could you mention some of those ways, please?

What do you suggest be done with a child who is engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior, brings weapons to school, etc.? (Beyond calling CPS, of course; anything beyond that is way outside my pay grade.)

And heck, yeah, you’d better believe that 9-year-olds are capable of knowing about this, and taking advantage of it.

When a child like this is in a classroom, the staff is not able to tell the other parents why the child is acting out, due to confidentiality issues. (This definitely wasn’t the case when I was growing up in the 1970s!)

As I saw on another board, “We cannot tell you that she was adopted out of an Eastern European orphanage 3 years ago. We cannot tell you that his parents are in the midst of a horrific divorce, and the kids are currently living with their aunt and uncle because neither parent is currently capable of taking care of them. We cannot tell you that her father has terminal cancer and the family is about to be evicted because his disability check is their only income…” etc., although in many cases, the other parents may know at least the bare bones of what’s going on with a very troubled child.

I don’t believe you, and I attended one of the roughest inner city schools you could imagine. I never saw the teachers behave that way. They were too afraid to be anything but respectful.

Students are suspended largely for the benefit and safety of the other students who want to learn. Too many liberals forget about them.

One person’s personal experience does not cancel/negate another person’s personal experience.

Holy shit!

Fuck all that noise. I’d pull my kids out of a school that adopted policies like that so fast it would make the administration’s heads spin.

BTW, it was not that long ago that California’s northern neighbor’s teachers’ union was calling it “A Crisis of Disrupted Learning

In C.S.Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader the Dufflepuds are comically inept little people. One of the stories about them is that once the cat got into their dairy, and twenty of them were hard at work moving the milk out. Nobody thought to remove the cat. It sounds like Dufflepuds are running the Oregon school board, and responding to a crisis where too many black cats are being removed from the dairy.

Regards,
Shodan

I’m sure those poor misunderstood kiddies aren’t willfully defiant, they’re merely exhibiting ODD or some other pathology beyond their control! :rolleyes:

Why? Do those kids cause more trouble per capita?

I completely believe her. I planned on becoming a teacher, and through that participated in quite a few practicums in a variety of Minneapolis and North Suburban schools. At least a third of the teachers I assisted were flat out racists.
One second grade teacher, instead of having me help struggling readers, sent me out in the hallway with a group of all black students to help them learn how to color in the lines. Daily, these kids were missing out on important classroom time to LEARN HOW TO COLOR. Only a few black kids who were clearly ahead of the other kids in class remained in the room.
Another teacher with a mixed 4/5th grade class would call the black students dummy, idiots, failures. He would also make asides to me, pointing out which black female students would be pregnant before 15, and which black male students would be in prison. He was a horrible teacher, and a worse human being. And he just didn’t care anymore. He was a year or two from retirement.
In an 8th grade English class, inner city junior high (where I attended 7 years prior) I had a student who was dealing with a horrific life. This young girl was supporting her family, working on the streets overnights. She’d still come to school almost every day, but would fall asleep in class. I asked the teacher if there was anything that could be done. She replied that if the student didn’t care enough to stay awake in class, she didn’t give a damn what happened to her, followed up with a comment about how none of “them” cared about getting an education, why should she care about providing one?

The reason they’re doing this is that the schools don’t try alternatives.

Think about this from an economics perspective; if they are not forced or incentivized to find ways of resolving behavioural problems, the easiest thing to do is kick the kid out of the school and make her someone else’s problem. People and organizations will take the path of least resistance; it’s just human nature.

There ARE cases where a child must be suspended or expelled. That is just the way it is. The problem in some boards is they use the suspension hammer all the time and usually against black kids.

This bill tells kids nothing. Children don’t pay attention to legislation.

Thanks for sharing this.

I agree there are racist teachers. How to deal with them? Well obviously “diversity training” as we all know has little effect and often makes things worse. They cant be fired because of tenure laws.

However I dont think blanket rules against suspensions help either.

We just had three murders in a single night in St. Paul.

More to the topic of schools, Minneapolis and St. Paul have a few nice schools. A few. If you’re well off and can’t get your kid into one of these schools you put them in a charter school, or private schools, or open enroll in the suburbs rather than have your kid not learn anything because the teacher can’t discipline anyone disrupting class.

Well from my experience they do try alternatives. Ex. calling parents, referrals to the office, ISS, and such.

Dearie dearie me, someone bring me my smelling salts! First graders running around the room and calling teachers names!!

Well, typically, the only alternative to suspension, when we’re talking about school discipline, is a good swift punch to the stomach.

The first, biggest mistake anyone can make regarding any big picture issue is to assume that their personal experience (and interpretation thereof) is somehow indicative of a universal truth. Doubly so when we’re talking about systems analysis from the perspective of a child. Your remembered experience as a student says almost nothing about whether or not your school had racially bifurcated discipline, let alone whether or not that might have been the case at another school in another part of the country decades later, let alone whether or not there’s some kind of trend or not.

Restorative discipline. Working WITH parents to discover what the problem is. Better classroom management. Not having racist asshole teachers bait black kids, and not having racist timid teachers freak out because if a black kid is loud in the hall, it’s seen as a prelude to assault.

That makes no sense. If a student is a threat to the safety of other students, removing them for 2-3 days every few weeks is not going to make anyone safer.

This. All those terrible schools everyone is complaining about DO suspend kids–and they are terrible still. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t change behavior. The kid is back in a few days. And if he didn’t deserve it–if he was suspended for some bullshit that white kids get away with–he’s now behind academically, humiliated, resentful–and he’s learned that being suspended is no big deal. So he acts out even more, and maybe the next suspensions are for more clearly egregious behavior. But it never had to be like that. That kid’s LITERAL LIFE has been ruined because some teacher decided he was a “bad seed” at nine.

This isn’t a blanket rule. It’s a rule against vague, groundless suspensions. It’s an attempt to invite self-reflection. I’ve been a racist teacher. I probably still am, though I try to monitor myself. But I know when I was young and straight from the suburbs, I “read” behavior different from kids based on race. Conversations like this truly helped me see how deeply entrenched the School-to-Prison pathway was and how I was complicit in it. And it made me notice my colleagues who were much more overt than I.

Look, middle-class white America loves the narrative of urban schools full of animalistic black kids lashing out at the kindly white teachers who only want to help them but are powerless against the biological reality that no one can help these kids. As a culture, we lap this shit up because it gets us off the hook for dealing with things like poverty and racism. But I’ve been here for nearly twenty years, and I am telling you, it’s not that simple. This is not all good teachers against rabid youth.

If you don’t believe that–if you don’t believe that there is a significant minority of teachers who ARE racist–than there’s no point in us even talking.

Is it racism to want to have a classroom without disruption? Is it racism to talk about bad/ Not involved parents? Is it racism to talk about unwed pregnancies? Is it racism to talk about poverty in the classroom and how it affects those students as well as the rest of the class?
Racist teachers won’t be around long especially with the growing definition of ‘racism’

If you are teaching (and that is what teaching is devolving to) to the lowest common denominator than it is clearly no surprise that the US is falling further and further behind other countries academically.

Personal responsibility.

Is it your responsibility as a teacher to get those uninvolved parents to cooperate with you to DEMAND your student/ their child, NOT be disruptive in class?
Black/White/Purple/Green I don’t give two fucks what color someone is if they are disrupting class, they need to fucking go.

THE PARENTS are the only ones responsible for the behavior of their children. Unless you are willing to take up that mantle Manda Jo.

If so, god speed and good luck.