When I was going to California Middle and High School in the late 90s we didn’t have detention in either. You basically got a written warning to your parents, then it immediately became ISS (In-School Suspension) where for either your entire lunch period or all day (depending on severity of offense) you sat in a room that was basically study hall.
I have no idea why they didnt give regular detention, maybe because parents complained about picking up their kids late?
I never could learn to stop going up the stairs two at a time.
Those 1920’s junior high kids must’ve been tiny.
Detention never seemed to work well as a means of shoring up idiotic and arbitrary authority.
Sorry, what is detention? Is that the one where you put the kid in an empty room for an hour? It’s a mild punishment, but it’s also mildly sociopathic, in a way I fail to put into words.
Detention does not mean the child is alone. I know of no school that does that. Usually the child is either with the teacher after school or in a room with other kids who’ve transgressed.
I think most schools still have detention. The one where I taught did. Kids who got ISS spent the day in the ISS room, supervised by a para. There was no talking (except to the supervisor), no sleeping, and students sat in carrels. Teachers supplied work for the students to do, usually an adaptation of what we were doing in class. At the school where my niece teaches, the school painted the room black, and the kids sit on stools all day, both of which seem like overkill to me.
My school also had an after-school study hall, where kids in trouble (usually for poor grades) did make-up work. We teachers were supposed to go there to answer questions. Kids who were in athletics had to skip practice. (The coaches were on board with this.)
Out-of-school suspension was reserved for more serious issues, like kids getting into fights.
Most teachers also gave kids lunch detention, where the kid had to come in during lunch. They got to eat, but usually had to make up classwork or, in a few cases, wash desks, etc. It also gave me an opportunity to converse with the student–very helpful!
I VERY seldom sent kids to the office. I handled what little discipline was needed on my own. (It’s not that I had angelic students; it’s that if you engage kids and use other tactics, there’s less need for discipline.)
yep, you went to a certain room if you were “locked out” or just kicked of class, it was painted black and you sat on the floor supposedly doing work … I just read books or napped … after the 32nd time of getting locked out mom reminded them that I’m disabled and can’t walk that fast via an attorney friend who went to a school board meeting… I missed the ADA by 2 or 3 years unfortunately
This doesn’t make sense. If the bus is late, every kid on that bus will arrive at the same time, and they won’t be counted tardy.
My WAG is that they’re talking about a public transit bus and not a school bus. A school bus will only have students on it, a city bus may only have one student.
A sixth grader having to use public transportation to get to school makes even less sense.
What’s nonsensical about it? I rode public transportation when I was in 6th grade, too.
So did I, over 40 years ago. And my kids used public transit to get home in sixth grade more recently. They would have used it to get to school if it wasn’t convenient for me to drop them off on my way to work. And Hari Seldon is certainly talking about a public bus- a kid who takes a school bus can’t choose to take one that’s half an hour earlier.
It sounds like asking for a lawsuit. Around here schools provide transportation for anyone not within walking distance. At least one school district near me will provide transportation for any student in the district. State law requires them to provide transportation for any student more than 2.5 miles away.
And in some states, the requirement to provide transportation can be fulfilled by providing free or reduced cost transit passes.
Couple of possible factors regarding school buses.
It could be a private, not public school.
The student, for whatever reason chooses not to use the school bus.
I’ve dealt with stupid blanket school policies in the past, once a teacher wrote everyone up as late to class because somebody threw up right outside the door and nobody was willing to cross the vomit stream to get into class until it was cleaned up, so teacher marked everyone as late.
And when I say stream, I mean literally you couldn’t cross it without an Indiana Jones style jump unless you wanted some liquid on your shoes.
It’s 2020 and no longer considered polite to describe a child as “tardy”.
No, asking for a lawsuit would be if the district routinely had class sizes 25% greater than the legally-mandated maximum, or still had racially-segregated schools in the 21st century, or had school buildings where the heat couldn’t be turned off all winter, no matter how hot the classrooms got. Putting kids on RTA buses barely blips the radar.
And how many of the students are more than 2.5 miles away?
I’m sure these are the sorts of things that vary depending on where (and, probably, when) you’re talking about. In my admittedly fuzzy, unreliable memories of my own school years, the kids who rode a school bus to school were generally the exception rather than the rule.
I was riding the city bus to and from school in high school, but would occasionally ride the bus downtown when I was much younger than that.
My high school didn’t have detention until my senior year. Before that, they would hand out “pages”. If you got in trouble, the teacher would tell you to write “x” pages on a subject of their choosing. It was usually whatever subject they happened to teach, never something subjective like “why it’s important to pay attention during class” or whatever. The teachers actually graded the paper as if it was an assignment. It didn’t go in the grade book, but you had to get a C or better for it to count. If you didn’t get a C or better, extra pages would be added to the assignment.
At the time, I hated it, but in hind sight, I now realize I learned something about whatever I wrote about. It also helped me realize that I learn better by reading, then writing (paraphrase), what I read. My grades improved after I figured that out. Senior year, our old principal retired and we got a new one that firmly believed in detention. Unfortunately, the teachers weren’t on board, so we still received “pages” AND detentions to make the principal happy.
Again, in hind sight, I realized in college that writing a paper was one of the easiest assignments I could receive, even now at work when I have to write something up, I can breeze through it without issue.
I still have one child in high school, they still give detentions, but I get to schedule it to fit my work schedule.
(Before I get a bad reputation for being a bad kid in school; I went to a very strict private school. Pages would be given for being late, slamming a locker door, shoes untied, shirt untucked, etc.
I grew up in the 1970s-80s in the US (NYC), I remember seeing films like “The Breakfast Club” and thinking this kind of “detention” room was a suburban thing. We never had a thing like that - a kind of desginated “deferred punishment” period of regular school with a room, a teacher, etc., for kids to just sort of be there (to be doing homework, or some other specific busywork like that essay in TBC).
Instead, kids “got sent to the principal’s office” for misbehaving in class, immediately, which usually involved sitting on a bench for a bit, and then having your parents called in, and so on. First pass discipline was left to the parents; then came suspensions in time ranging from days to weeks; then expulsion.
Oh yeah, sometimes in Elementary School, being “sent to the principal’s office” for in-class fighting meant doing busywork in the principal’s office. Stapling, sealing envelopes, filing, that kind of thing. Working next to the kid you had been fighting with. Or, er, so I heard.
There were a few times kids were given after school duties as punishment, usually to fix or clean up their transgressions. Kids caught doing graffiti were put to effacing it, that sort of thing.