I wouldn’t go as far as Der Trihs as to say that the administrators are pro-bully, but they are definitely more interested in avoiding paperwork/effort/liability than they are in enforcing justice.
Although, doesn’t zero-tolerance also give a lying incentive, which is that, if the aggressor lies and says that the victim fought back when the victim *didn’t *fight back, that the victim will be punished the same anyway?
because the adults running the school would have to think, and we can’t have that.
My rules…
If someone is being a dick, just walk away, dont even bother arguing with them, not worth it
you can not argue with stupid
If they put their hands on you, wont let you walk away, hurt them, they caused it, you are just ending it
If they are bigger than you, then get the biggest thing you can and hurt them with it.
They bought that themselves.
No one has any right to expect you to sit there and get your ass beat while yelling for help that wont come, or if it does come, you will already be beat to a pulp.
I do not know about all places, but when i went to school, where i went to school, a known bully was very likely to find themselves being bounced off a set of lockers by a teacher, they did not put up with that stuff.
And welting a kids backside was just a normal days business, gave you a reason to think about the stupid idea you just had before carrying it out…
No one died, and i dont think anyone was permanently traumatized, i survived it, and i got a few good weltings, because well, sometimes stupid idea wins.
Now days, teacher cant dont or wont discipline they turn a blind eye to things, and seem to have about 0 control. Some their fault, some the systems fault.
If they cant or wont defend the kids, why punish the kids for defending themselves?
What lesson does that teach?
Only lesson i see it teaching is that you are screwed no matter what you do, no wonder kids turn to suicide so much with lessons like that.
This type of thing is nothing new. My high school 25 years ago didn’t have a modern day version of zero-tolerance but there was a rule that if you hit another student, you would be suspended no matter what. I won a basketball game of Horse against a guy that went by the name “Cheese” because he smelled like cheese all the time. He disputed the result and told me I had to pay him the cold, hard dollar we bet (an infraction on its own) because my foot was over the line. It wasn’t but he wasn’t having any of that. He really wanted his $1.
Now Cheese wasn’t the brightest person in the world but he was much bigger than me back then but I was much smarter. I waited until the gym teacher was clearly looking and told him it was on. As soon as he hit me, I cried Help! and the gym teacher broke it up. We both had to go to the principle’s office to explain what happened. Cheese was still all about that $1 which wasn’t a good argument in the principle’s office and I claimed assault. Cheese got a suspension and I got nothing because he didn’t understand technicalities very well.
Cheese was really pissed off when he got back from detention so I got my very tough best friend to beat the shit out of him in the bathroom when no one else was around. That solved that problem for good.
As to the OP, I would complain to the principle, school board and whoever else you have available. Even stupid bureaucracies are adverse to bad publicity and forbidding a clear case of self-defense is outside of the “reasonable person” standard.
Correct that to “principal”.
There are bullies everywhere, from Sunday School to the White House, and the reason for that is because they learn how to game the system. If you change the system, they will just change their strategy and tactics.
Introduce an order in which the victims get off scot-free, and the bullies will figure out a way to make themselves appear to be the victims. “He hit me fist.”
If you escalate the defense, you will just escalate the offense, and wind up with G. Gordon Liddy’s “Head shots” doctrine – make sure your version is that of the only surviving witness.
Too many grey areas.
I have made it clear to my kids that
- will never get in trouble from me for defending themselves
- will never get in trouble from me for stopping a bully
I work at an elementary school, and have playground duty daily. I tell the kids they can keep somebody from hurting them. If they go further than that, it can be more of a problem. If it’s a group bullying one person, they may find that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. I secretly cheer when a bully gets put in his/her place. I’ve been known to not be very sympathetic when they come crying to me.
A factor not really mentioned: some parents will back up their kids, regardless of what bad thing they have done - I expect parents of bullies especially do thisccausing trouble for schools. My grandson switched schools to avoid bullies: the PE instructor, and the son of his teacher.
The schools best response is to deescalate the situation. Your kid is not getting punished as much as they don’t want him to have to fight the other kids friends the next day. The school isn’t pro bully. They’re anti violence. Send everyone involved home and by the time they get back its old news.
I think the problem is that “first strike goes home” is also a bad rule: there’s a type of kid that is really good at finding sensitive kids and taunting them into taking a swing. In those cases, sending the “attacker” home and treating the other kid like the poor victim is compounding the error, because it’s validating that verbal abuse to whatever degree is fine and that he was the only “bad” kid.
There are also cases where either person had multiple opportunities to walk away from a fight and did not. You want a rule in place to encourage BOTH kids to walk away when he can–otherwise, both kids can taunt each other, wind each other up, because BOTH kids think it’s the other kid that is going to snap (because kids are really really dumb). Finally one does, randomly, and then you have a fight. If both kids had known it didn’t matter who threw the first punch, it wouldn’t have escalated.
And while I detest falling back on “zero-tolerance” policies, I’m also wary of what can happen when administrators or teachers “investigate”. I know that behaviors that are seen as innocuous from some kids are seen as “gang violence” in others. A lot of the things that trigger that are class- and race- based, but it isn’t even as simple as that. I’ve got a student right now that just smirks in this way that screams “entitled white kid bully”. But I swear he’s not. But in a big high school with 2500 kids, I can totally imagine an administrator who vaguely knows him assuming he’s the perpetrator of an altercation.
It’s just hard to know what really happened in these situations, and you hate to be wrong. This is why I let a lot of cheating go by: the damage being accused of cheating when you didn’t is just so much more profoundly devastating than the damage done by getting away with cheating. So in an ambiguous situation, I can see telling both kids I believed them but have to punish them anyway–that way, the true victim gets the satisfaction of at least not seeing their attackers go free, and if their parents and others have faith in them, it’s not so bad. And all the kids get the “cool down” period that sitchinsis mentioned. It’s not a perfect situation. but with imperfect information you have to go with what you’ve got. In my experience, non-teachers relying on their memories of school vastly overestimate how much information the adults have access too.
This is also why draconian punishments are dumb. Raise the stakes too high, and you can’t actually evoke them without rock-solid proof–because it’s the end of the world if you’re wrong. Moderate punishments are more flexible and I think easier to assign.
I agree. Many years ago, one of my men’s kids was assaulted on a school bus. He had reported the kid for smoking dope, which had earned the kid a short vacation. He defended himself and they both got a suspension. My employee was outraged by this, as he should have been, but took it further than that.
He went to the school the next day to see the principal, who told him that it was school policy. He told the principal: “Well, here’s my policy. My wife and I both work and cannot take a week off to stay at home with my son, who has done nothing wrong. I am going to bring him to school tomorrow to attend his classes, and you’re going to make sure that he stays safe. If I come home tomorrow and he has been sent home again, I’m going to come back here the following day alone and we are going to have a serious problem. You can decide if that would be a good solution for you or not.”
I really thought the cops would show up during the day and question him. I didn’t condone the implied threat, but I had some respect for him standing up for his child.
Yes, adults are expected to do that when they’re on the lower end of the social scale. My employer is quite explicit that use of physical violence by an employee for any reason will result in termination.
But we’re just retail drones here, not anyone of importance, and almost as low as illegal immigrants these days.
In grade school my son stepped in to defend a developmentally disabled classmate who was being tormented by two bigger kids. My son took on two bullies and won.
He got a three day suspension, as did the two bullies. I took time off work and turned it into a three day celebration/vacation. I made it a learning experience about “do the right thing” and “life isn’t always fair”.
Two words: restraining order.
Any chance Beemer could benefit from martial arts classes?
The way it’s supposed to work is that the bully starts something, and a teacher immediately steps in and stops it before it’s necessary for the victim to defend himself. Or better yet, the school cultivates a culture where bullying is not acceptable, and nobody ever even starts anything in the first place. And in good schools, that’s actually the way it does work: At the school I went to for 10th-12th grade, for instance, there were rumors among the students about what the penalty for fighting was, but they were only rumors, since there had literally been no fights in the entire memory of the student body.
On the other end of the scale, you do have schools like Der Trihs describes, that are run by bullies and are pro-bully as a result. The school I went to for 9th grade, the official administrative position was “Oh, there’s always one kid who gets picked on freshman year, but by sophomore year, that always seems to resolve itself somehow”. Well, I was that one kid, and in the end, it resolved itself by the school kicking me out. Or the school I was at in 6th grade, where I got kicked out for fighting, even though I didn’t even fight back, while the kid who bit me got a detention.
Of course, most schools are somewhere in between these two extremes.
I don’t think it’s “administrative laziness” as much as it’s tax paid school administators should be doing more valuable work than playing crime scene investigator, interigator, hearing judge, and sentence giver.
These situations aren’t black and white where the bully has a big “B” on his shirt and we can watch the instant replay to see who hit who first.
These are occurances of he-said she-said and who did what first and second and who saw what and who’s friends with who and who’s lying, etc. etc. I’d rather have education dollars go into ya-know “educating” kids rather than opening a student dispute investigation depatment in the school.
Zero-tolerance is the way to avoid all the nonsense and put out the “take a time-out, knock this shit off and get back to class” message.
Same reason states have no-fault traffic accident laws. Trying to sort out whose fault it was just wastes alot of time, money, and resources and usually doesn’t figure out anything anyway.
And if someone has their education or life disrupted due to the actions of others because the admin can’t be assed to take care of the children who have been given into their care, that’s just peachy.
Yes, we are thinking that he could benefit from martial art classes. Not because we think he needs to be Chuck Norris, but because we want him to know how to manage himself and these situations without getting hurt or seriously hurting anyone else.
I think this school is between the two extremes. I’ll be watching this pretty closely. It turns out that the other kid had been taunting and picking on my kid in gym class for a while now. Stupid stuff, like locking his locker again while my son was trying to get dressed, so he had to open the locker again to get his stuff. When my son tried to get the teacher to do something about it, he was told to “Just ignore it.” I’ve escalated that (and will keep escalating it). On Friday, therefore, 'Beamer had no real belief that any adult would come to help him. He tried to walk away. The group attacked him from behind and he fought back.
A confounding factor, but I’m not sure how much it’s at play in this, is that he is high-functioning autistic. He is being main streamed. He’s probably just different enough that it made him a target.
All in all, I’m proud of him for fighting back against a group. I wish he had told me about the issue weeks ago, but I think it wasn’t important to him, so he dismissed it. (Take that bully - you were a trivial annoyance!) I’ve asked him to tell me about any other incidents though, so they can be dealt with by someone other than “Just ignore him” before they escalate into being jumped by a group of kids.
My own thoughts are that this school and teacher took an easy situation that started weeks ago and allowed it to build up. I can see why to a certain extent. You want kids to learn some conflict resolution on their own. I do it with my own kids. “Just ignore him” is a life skill we all need at some point, but it was the wrong life skill here.
Once it got to violence, I also don’t think they are serving the community. They didn’t ask the right questions to get the full story. Another prime example of why absolute policies serve no one.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I believe that a zero tolerance policy on violence that includes self-defense only leads to more harm to “good” kids. They are harmed either because the bad kids don’t care about the policy and just hurt them, or the idea is reinforced that no one will help them and that they are not allowed to help themselves. I have to believe that it harms those with low self esteem even more. No wonder kids commit suicide. What a fucking mess.
Actually, it is their job to sort all this out. They do it every day now for all kinds of things. I get that zero tolerance makes this easier for them, but I am firmly of the belief that it’s not better for the kids. It protects the bad kids at the expense of the good ones. I come from a family of educators. Grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, sister, in-laws. After decades of talking with them and hearing stories about kids, I feel certain that teachers have a pretty good sense of things and could sort things out with appropriate support.
I don’t think that asking that kids are appropriately managed at school for all levels of dispute, including the violent ones, is unreasonable. If it’s done right, at all levels, there should be fewer violent incidents.