Misbehavior that directly results in an injury to a teacher or other student is certainly worthy of a suspension. That the suspension was written to the root of the problem (that the child was wandering unsupervised in the school when he didn’t belong there) so that the parents can clearly understand what is expected of them in the future receives the CrazyMonkey Seal of Approval.
It is possible that this is not the first time he has been told not to be on school grounds but I am not sure that is the point of the suspension. The point, it seems to me, is to force the parents to deal with their child care issue. The school is not set up to do so.
If the school needs to run a second session in order to handle all the children they are supposed to deal with, where are they supposed to put kids who are ditched there? Who is supposed to be watching him? I would probably be willing to bet if it was the kid who broke his arm, not the teacher, there would be a law suit filed right now. What happens to the school if it gets out they let this slide and every other parent, who actualy found afterschool care for their child decides to just let their kid hang at the school. The school would become a substantialy less safe place.
Schools are pretty good at making sure that everyone knows the rules. It is mearly supposition, but almost every school I have ever dealt with has some kind of thing parents have to sign that deals with knowing where their kids are. I strongly doubt that the parents had no idea their kid wasn’t supposed to be there. They knew they were abusing the system and they got caught. While it is unfortunate the kid has to be the one who gets punished we don’t know how the suspension was set up. It could be that he gets to come back as soon as he can prove he has somewhere to go after school.
Clearly the parents are the culprits in this situation, and suspending the kid was likely the administration’s exasperated reaction to them ignoring school rules, with such painful consequences for the teacher.
I have a colleague that stays after school, voluntarily, to give extra help to a kid. She is supposed to leave at 3:30, but this kid’s mom regularly doesn’t show until 4:15 or later. The mom is self-righteous about this, making excuses and treating my friend like she is a free babysitter. My friend cannot in good conscience leave this kid to walk the halls of school alone, but as after school time is unpaid, she is loathe to foist him off on someone else who happens to be around.
I don’t think this kid (or the kid in the OP) should be suspended for the parents’ cavalier lack of regard for the teacher’s time and school rules, but I am hard pressed to figure out what else could be done…oh wait, maybe funding an afterschool program? “No child left behind” indeed.
I think FisherQueen meant that while he is on the school property, the school is liable for anything that happens to him. In that respect they are responsible for him. They will be held accountable if anything happens to him. The school itself is not a free after-school daycare. He shouldn’t be there if it means the school suddenly burdened with this extra responsibility, liability etc. without their consent.
I don’t see why there is any confusion at all.
The suspension is a little harsh, but essentially the kid was sort of trespassing, and he caused a serious injury.
But the kid was racing through the halls which would not have been allowed during regular operating hours for exactly the reason that someone could get hurt. I remember a big rule in grade school was “no running in the halls”, ever! So here’s a kid who isn’t authorized to be there, breaking the rules, and causing serious injury.
The parents are the true jackasses, but if the kid hadn’t been suspended, I would have little respect for the administration.
Suppose the following: the school pushes the kid out the door after his last class, knowing that the parents aren’t around and the child will be unable to return home for some time. If that child gets hurt, kidnapped, killed, whatever, in between, the school will be facing a different kind of lawsuit.
IANA lawyer, but if I were on a jury I might be convinced the school has some liability in such cases.
How about this…it’s kind of a crazy idea I know, you know actually having parents (shock) be accountable and all, but the parents know what time school gets over.
They knew it when they enrolled their kids. If they have to work, fine…but damn who the hell’s responsibility is it for the kid after the end of the school day?
I have this crazy notion that the school is responsible for the kid when he is in classes (or school program) , and the parents (shock) are responsible after school. End of story.
If the parents choose to pass on that responsibility to the next door neighbor or a daycare provider…fine, but it’s ultimately THEIR DAMN responsibility.
The only school responsibility I can see here comes in the issue of mandatory reporting of child abuse. I don’t know enough of the details of the case to form an opinion…but if the lack of parental oversight rises to the level of “abuse”…AND the school knows about it, then they are mandated to report it.
(Again I 'm forming my opinions here based on the scarce details in the OP…there don’t seem to be any further details provided).
:rolleyes: They wouldn’t throw the kid out the door saying “hit the bricks, kid!” WTF are you even thinking?
Typically CAS is called. Mom_Crayons worked for CAS for years and that was surprisingly common. A CAS intake worker would show up with a police officer and they would make arrangements for the kid until the parents could be located.
It was treated in the same way as reports of a “child home alone”. And parents did get in shit for being too irresponsible to arrange for proper after-school care.
Why would the child be unable to return home? Have these people not wrapped their tiny minds around the idea of a babysitter? No, they think the school provides free babysitting (and I do mean free-- when I stay after with a kid, I am NOT GETTING PAID for it) and don’t give a rat’s ass that teachers might have kids too who might like to having a parent at home when they get home.
If poverty is an issue and they can’t afford a babysitter, the parents should look into an afterschool program at a local community center, or a club/sport/etc that meets daily after school. The kid having nowhere to go after 3 is not the school’s problem and the school is not liable for what the kid does when UNLESS he stays in the building… which is why they want him outta there. Parents whose kids have to walk the streets for hours after school are negligent and should have CPS on their ass for it.
God, am I sick of the school being held responsible for what parents are supposed to do. Why are teachers such an easy target? Because parents like this don’t want to do the real work required to be a good parent. Screw them. Now they have a kid who is suspended and has to stay home THE WHOLE DAY. Someone might have to take a sick day and spend some time with the child. Oh no!
WTF am I thinking? I’m thinking they tell kids to hit the bricks every day. They have certain assumptions that the parents will be home or that they will pick the child up, but they don’t know it for a fact or verify it. Sending the kind out on the street with the knowledge that the kid cannot return home is a totally different situation that could end the school up on the losing end of a lawsuit.
I started a thread a some months* back, a different case that made headlines in the local media. An elementary school took a field trip to a water park in the Wisconsin Dells. All the children were told they needed to be back on the bus by a certain time. One child didn’t show, and the rest, teachers, chaperones and driver, got back on the bus and left him behind. They didn’t even tell the park officials or the local police that the kid was missing. Fortunately, a woman picked up the little boy off a roadside bench and drove him home.
So don’t tell me that a school wouldn’t do such a thing. And I don’t give a damn what rules they quoted to the kids or parents. If that child had been injured or killed, they might be slapped with a multi-million dollar damage award, and justifiably so.
*I can’t seach for it at the moment, though if you care to search for my posts you could probably find it with the related news links I’m having some problems with Java that prevents me from opening secure web pages, so I’m unable to subscribe yet. And the SDMB seems to have removed search rights for non-subscribers.
Boyo Jim said
Thats an entirely different point. Of course in that case the school is resopnsible. They are supposed to have the children at that time. They are supposed to get him back to the school at the agreed upon time in order to give him back to the parents. The other thing is that they have agreed to the responsiblilty. In this case they have not.
**Rubystreak ** Said
I wonder if your friend needs to put her foot down and refuse to do the tutoring until such time as the parent agrees to do her part. I realise that can be hard when you make a difference for a kid, but it can’t help that child in the long run to be shown it is ok to disrespect someone that is doing you a favor.
I agree that it is a very different situation, and I should have clarified that I was responding to a specific comment from Eats_Crayons:
Nevertheless, I find the story particularly apalling in one respect. Abanding the kid was not the act of a single idiot teacher or principal, but a joint decision by a group of adults, any one of whom could have decided to stay at the park and look for the child, call the cops, etc.
Holy shit! You really do think these episodes are comparable!
Let me run it by you.
Again.
The astute reader will see that I said
The astute reader will note that a school sponsored trip is a “school program”…so they are responsible for said kid.
The astute reader will note that the kid YOU mentioned in the OP is no longer in a school sponsored program at the end of the school day.
How does ths work…if Johnny’s parents don’t get home till 8pm at night, is the school ALSO supposed to have personnel stay behind for little Johnny?
After all, they are " knowing that the parents aren’t around and the child will be unable to return home for some time."
Of course!
If the school knows that a kid has been dumped somewhere and can’t go home. Then the expected protocol is to call the police and CAS! That’s what they are supposed to do.
If they actually do just kick him out knowing full well he can’t go home, then yes, they are deserving of whatever liability comes their way.
This did not happen in the OP.
Your OP said nothing of the sort! Aside from some “apparently they’d prefer he wander the streets” which is presumably just your hyperbole rather than official school policy. I’d like to see an actual cite which says that “school officials prefer the kid wanders the streets.”
As furlibusea said this is a completely different case altogether and involved both idiotic teachers and parent chaperones in a shocking and highly unusual display of gross negligence (which is why it got so much press – it’s “unusual and shocking”).
If that occurence is as regular as you suggest and really does happen “all the time”, then your shool system is in far worse shape than I thought.
You’re portraying the school as a total ogre, when it doesn’t seem they did anything wrong at all.
It is most certainly NOT the school’s responsibility to investigate that. That is an issue for the police and CAS (and if the kid is too young, being at home alone is no solution either because it’s not safe of legal).
It seems that there are two problems that Boyo Jim had in the OP. First he was bothered that the school was seeming to suspend the student for “trespassing” rather than for what happened with the teacher. Secondly he was bothered by the school “pushing the student out the door” when his school day was done.
there have been plenty of responses to the second issue, I thought I might offer a possible rationale for the school suspension reasoning.
Keeping in mind that the details are limited:
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Kid runs over teacher…but it appears that it was accidental, can you really suspend a kid for an accident?
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Can you suspend a kid for running in the hallway? Maybe not.
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Do we know for a fact that the kid was aware of the seriousness of what happened to the teacher…or was just running down the hall oblivious to what was happening?
I could easily see a principal (who probably has 5 other kids waiting in the office to be seen by him) realizing that trying to suspend a student based upon the above three reasons might be tougher to substantiate and defend than suspending a student for the easily proven fact that he was in effect “trespassing”.
If the principal NEVER indicated to the student that running through the hall and knocking over the teacher was wrong, then yes the principal (IMHO) acting incorrectly. With the few facts in the OP, I’m not convinced that that was the case.
Generally, running in school halls is verboten. It’s one of the big general rules that is pretty explicitly communicated (I remember that from school. We’d get in doo-doo if we were caught running in the halls, even if it was just going from class to class. We mastered the art of speedwalking.)
It’s kinda like the way (in my school at least) throwing snowballs is not allowed. Just being caught throwing a snowball was a good guarantee for detention. Bean someone in the eye, or hurt someone with a snowball then, oh yeah, you’d get suspended.
So suspending the kid for a few days is reasonable and expected if he caused physical harm by breaking one of those “general rules” that they expound from your first day of school onward. (Providing the suspension is within reason – the OP doesn’t say if the suspension was for a day, a week, or a month.)
The OP said there were other students in the building, so it could just as easily have been little Suzie on the way to the bathroom that the kid crashed into, breaking her arm, leg, or neck. I wonder what the OP would’ve been like then?
Interestingly, we don’t even know the kid’s age. Was he six or twelve?
Of course running is verboten. Is running in the halls grounds for automatic suspension?
Are ALL kids who run in the hallway automatically suspended?
I’m guessing no.
The kid was wrong to run in the hall. The kid was wrong (although it may have been “accidental”) to knock down the teacher. Whether those things necessarily add up to an easily justified/explainable suspension (versus detention, in school suspension etc…) may be another matter.
I was offering an alternative explanation for the suspension decision…basically taking a big honkin’ wild ass guess. Again, suspension reasons are generally considered confidential.
Dave read my post in its entirety – escpecially the “snowball” comparisson. Breking a Big Rule (like “no running” or “no snowballs”) isn’t usually a suspension offense, but break one of those rules and cause serious physical harm like breaking a teacher’s arm, is indeed usually met with a more sever penalty.
My whole class got detention in the seventh grade for a snowball fight, but the entire time I was in school, only one kid got suspended for throwing a snowball and that’s because it knocked out another kid’s tooth.
So I’m guessing yes – break a rule that breaks someone’s arm and you’ll get an unscheudled holiday.
You don’t think that’s reasonable?
Do I think it’s reasonable?
Yes.
I of course never claimed otherwise.
Again I was putting myself in the mind of the principal trying to come up with a plausible explantion to fit the details of the OP.
It’s entirely possible (and again…I’m NOT saying that this happened, but that it’s a possibility) that the principal thought it would be easier to (a) berate the student for running in school and knocking over a teacher, causing injury…but (b) list “trespassing” as an “official” reason for the suspension. Does that make sense?
Ah, yes. Indeed that does make sense. Now I understand what you mean, and yes, I agree. It’s a bit weird for that alone to the THE reason for the suspension.
I suspect that it was “he broke a rule, he broke an arm, and he wasn’t even supposed to be there in the first place!.. gasp” So that ended up being the most egregious offence in the eyes of administration. It’s weird, but not totally out of line when you consider the frightening liability issues of having an unsupervised minor running amok.
Well in my hypothetical, that’s not what I’m saying.
The “trespassing” was perhaps the (for lack of a better term) “easiest” to justify/prove to a parent…not necessarily the most egregious.