I believe in your case ventbridge, your system is quite fair…it is your employee’s use of the word that is faulted, and i would be peeved in much the same way. Seeing as how people have different opinions of what is fair, i don’t believe we should shy away from the word…fair is something we should strive for, just use your judgement on what fair is
As for my brother, deep inside i do believe he feels guilty (as he should). He is not the type to appologize however, and he shows no signs of reform. I do believe he will grow up, but at least for a while he is an ungratefull little jerk who is quite mean spirited (especially to his mother). On the upside he is also VERY intelligent and receptive for his age…just needs to work out those nasty selfishness issues
Here in Texas they will fine you if your kid doesn’t make it to school. BUT parents can also sign a wavier form stating something to the effect of “My teen is uncontrolable” Which basically means they’ll come take your kid and put him/her in some sort of juvy home untill he/she has learned their lesson or untill they are 18. This form also absolves you from paying any fines as well. And this is EXACTLY what I’ll do if I find my kid stats to F’ up like this.
(sigh) misses the good ol’ days when it was alright to beat a kid into submission. stoopid PC’ers…
Maybe I am spoiled. My kids are such angels that I cannot even imagine hitting them. I felt awful when my daughter did something (can’t remember what) when she was 6 or 7 and I told her I was disappointed in her. She cried, and before it was all said and done I had tears in my eyes.
We’ve set up both parents and schools to fail. I’m guessing that your mom works and can’t easily take time off to accompany your brother to school - and her standing over him is probably going to be the only thing that keeps him from truency. But the school needs to do something, because they are held accountable for his performance and if he doesn’t show up, he probably won’t learn well enough to test well.
In an ideal world, instead of the school system fining her, the courts should give her paid leave from work (who would pay for this, I don’t know), so that she can spend a few days taking your brother from class to class. The embarrassment might be enough to keep him in school - knowing that “Mommy” would walk him to class if he didn’t. Or it would be enough to push him over the edge into true “I’m going to screw up my own life no matter what!” in which case boot camp looks good.
I was a good kid who always went to class - but I hung with some kids who were lucky to go to class a few times a week. When parents work (and I’m a working mom myself) there is little you can do. Broke parents can’t do much to remove privledges - I never skipped because my well off parents would have yanked my car, my potential college tuition, my allowance, and my extracurricular activities but my friends parents had nothing to take from their kids - they couldn’t remove access to the Playstation, there was none (not that any of us had Playstations in the dark ages when you had to leave the couch to change the TV channels). Taking away TV did nothing - they didn’t have cable and there wasn’t much on broadcast the kids viewed as severe enough punishment to stop the behavior. And the kids who didn’t go to school had long ago given up extracurricular activities. Grounding them in the evening seemed to be a fair trade to some of my friends for being able to run free and not go to school all day. They were smart enough kids that they knew beating them silly wasn’t an option for their parents, unless their parents wanted to deal with truency and a child abuse charge. And kids who grow up in poverty often have a hard time seeing that school may be a means to break the poverty cycle - a high school degree doesn’t go a long way and college seems so out of reach to a lot of fourteen year olds who don’t have money and don’t feel they have a chance at a scholarship.