Should Schools Pay Students to Inform on Their Classmates?

Georgia High School to Pay Student Informants

It is one thing to encourage students to be observant and report criminal activity, but it is quite another thing to pay them a bounty to rat out their classmates. For one thing, as Mike Brady said, “Nobody like a snitch”. Turning school kids into stoolies is not a goal we should encourage, no matter what the threat from guns or drugs is. But I see other problems, such as planting evidence on a rival, and selling them down the river. The likelihood of abuse is too great, and the consequences too damaging. There are other ways to curb crime in schools without turning our kids into paid tattle-tales.

I agree. Besides, $10 is nothing. I could also see the administration using “anonymous tips” as a pretense for searching people when no tip has been given. Plus, I think most teachers/administrators know which kids are on drugs or are selling them.

They know who the stoners and burnouts are, and maybe those are the people they’d want to nail. Locking up your honor students because they smoke pot on the weekends sometimes, not so beneficial. Although like everything else with schools, this is probably just a liability thing: they don’t want to be accused of ignoring or overlooking that some crime that could’ve been caught in the early stages was going on. One more instance of creeping paranoia…

Anyone else see the subtle irony of financing a drug informant scheme with candy and soda sold in a school in this age of increasing teenage obesity?

Having seen abuses with adult paid informants, I’d be dead-set against this program. I agree with **Fear Itself ** that it would be just too easy to set up someone you needed to even a score with.

Of course, this is the kind of stuff you can expect when you name your school after a German Field Marshall…

While I too can see the potential for abuse and would be against the scheme for that reason, I’ve never understood the stigma against “snitching.” I doubt I ever will.

It’s really not hard to understand, it’s just hard to articulate. There’s a big stigma involved in siding with authority instead of your peer group.

Good god, this is a bad idea. You’d have kids setting up someone totally innocent, not just to avoid being caught, but to get even, or further harass someone they hated. Or someone would find out who snitched, and beat the ever living shit out of him or her. Corrupt school officials lying about someone being turned in…ugh.

Is there any necessity to verify any facts before doling out money or can a kid pick up a quick 25 bucks just for saying he saw the homecoming queen doing one hits under the bleachers?

Are the snitches allowed to remain anonymous?

I can see this thing spinning out of control with students using this thing as a way to grab a few cheap bucks and maybe prank or harass anyone they don’t like.

I know there is a big stigma involved. As I said, I don’t understand the stigma involved.

That’s what I was trying to explain. The stigma is there because you’re siding with Authority instead of your peers - Them instead of Us. People want to be able to get away with stuff. :stuck_out_tongue:

But snitching isn’t necessarily to authority. It’s often about authority, and still people blame the messenger.

Well, it depends on the situation. Sometimes, snitching is warranted, and the people you’re snitching on aren’t your peers-or people you want to be associated with in the first place. Bullying and harassment, for example, SHOULD be “snitched.”

Are all kidding? I’d have frigging loved this when I was in high school. Before the echo from the annoucement had faded, I’d get a bunch of friends to put Equal and basil in baggies, and then have people turn each other in in a round-robin fashion. If there’s an issue, make sure that the baggies are disposed of before the report happens, and the snitcher can still legitamately report that he saw baggies of white powder / herb in the target’s possession.
My personal standard for cases like this is as follows:
If I can come up with a way to game the system for actual tangible reward within 5 seconds of hearing about it, it’s probably a conceptually bad system.

Its all about perspective. When someone ‘snitches’ on the people in power to the enemy we call it treason. How fondly would society look on someone who called up Kim Jong and told him about a spy? In a High School social setting the powerful (i.e. the popular clique) normally looks at drugs as perfectly fine and views the school administration as the enemy. It will do the samething to a snitch as our society would do to the person that gave information to Kim Jong II, ostracize them.

I just want to say that this is absolutley not true. I teach high school. My high school experience was varied enough that I am aware of both how wide-spread drug use really is and what it is like. Today, I am easily one of the most popular teachers in my school, with a great rapport with the kids. I say this not to brag, but to make it absolutly clear that if any teacher was going to have a coherent picture of drug use/abuse in a school, it would be me. And I don’t. Sure, there are 10% that I am pretty sure are drug users, and 10% that I am pretty sure are not, but there is this huge group in the middle that I have no idea if they use or abuse drugs or not. Honestly, I don’t spend that much time thinking about it, because unless they act in such a way that I have reasons to worry about their mind or their body, it’s out of my control and really has nothing to do with my relationship with them in any case.

Kids always think teachers know more than they do: it’s the self-absorption of adolecence that leads you to believe that most people are living life through your eyes.

Rewarding people for informing on your friends and neighbors has proven highly effective in maintaining some very orderly and law-abiding societies. East Germany, Vichy France, North Korea, and Baathist Iraq, for example.

Role models all, though hardly the kind we would have wished for when I was in school … why back in my day, the po-po would slip some baby-faced narc into the mix and round up all the usual suspects within about five days or so. And use the drug dogs, too.

That stuff costs money though. Privatization marches on, I guess.

I teach high school and my school has a similar program that has been quite effective. I can remember several cases involving theft and vandalism where the perpetrators were caught because of information provided by other students. Informants are able to remain relatively anonymous, and they receive a $100 reward if their information leads the school authorities or police to the perps. Recently, our prinicpal received a phoned-in bomb threat that was taken seriously enough to send us all outside for a couple of hours. By the next day, the prankster was caught.

:rolleyes: Oh, please. You’re the kind of criminal mastermind who would find yourself outwitted nine ways to Sunday by the administrators. I guarantee you this Georgia school isn’t handing out money to every dumbass who comes in saying “I saw Johnny Doe with a bag of white powder. Now where’s my reward money?”

At my school, trying to “game” this system could easily get you arrested. Informants can’t get paid just for making up false accusations about someone. To get any money, your information first has to lead the police to a real crime/criminal. You aren’t paid a dime until this occurs. Giving false information to the police can get your own ass in BIG trouble. We haven’t had any problems with this.

The thing is, the idiots who pull these kinds of crimes always brag about it in front of their friends and other kids in their “crowd.” Usually, it’s one of these kids who turns them in.

When the principal and/or on-campus police officer then calls in the suspect for questioning, he usually folds like a cheap lawn chair.

It’s not something that is abused by our school officials–really it’s not an everyday or even every-month occurence. I believe it has been successful as a deterrent to criminal activity on our campus.

Simply put–it works.

Good to know it’s not that easy to scam, but personally this doesn’t answer any of my qualms with it.

When I was in high school I was at the absolute bottom of the social ladder and incredibly straight-laced and prudish. To give you an example, I got harrassed because I wouldn’t become a turtle because I was too prudish to say, “You bet your sweet ass I am!” when someone would ask, “Are you a turtle?”

This system of paying kids to snitch on others seems it would have added a whole new level of pain and humiliation to my high school years. First of all, I can see being hauled in for investigation because someone had snitched on me. The article doesn’t say what happens to kids who are turned in; if parents are notified, it could make the student’s home life even worse. It would have done so for me. Second, because I was ridiculously straight-laced, I could see getting beat up because someone thought I’d turned someone in or had been told I did.

I admit different schools work differently and my old high school has a particularly bad record. A few years ago, after the rash of school shootings we had, the school instituted a program where they would give “Kindness Dollars” or something like that when a kid did something nice. According to the local paper, this lead to incidents where a kid would trip another kid, help the kid up, then collect a Kindness Dollar. :eek: Lord knows what they could do with a program like this!

CJ