Provide a cite that teachers are required to initiate force to prevent students from talking on a phone.
If it is true, then the rule needs to be changed.
Ignoring that you are assuming the teacher is the one telling the truth…
Why not refer the matter to the office without grabbing the phone?
What about a cell phone makes it so dangerous that you have to use force to extract it from the student’s grasp?
It is a central question that as of yet nobody has answered.
As I said above, I run a prison. I like rules. I don’t just enforce the rules, I write rules that other people will enforce.
But I understand the rules have a reason. Rules are here to serve people, not people are here to serve the rules. Part of my job is to create and enforce rules, but another part of my job is to recognize that not every situation is covered by the rules. And that’s when I use common sense and judgement.
So when a rule is broken I will probably punish the offender - but I will also stop and consider that he might have had a valid reason for breaking the rule. And if he did, I’ll let it go. And if somebody else tries to claim they can now break that rule because I let the first guy do it, I’ll tell them no. And if he asks why, I’ll say it’s because I judged the first guy had a different situation. And if he asks who made me the judge, I’ll say the State of New York.
All of this is based on my awareness that the rules are a tool I use - I am not a tool of the rules.
I agree with you but be careful. Apparently SOME people have a big problem with the phrase “common sense”. 
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On to other things. We had one self described “prison hack” say he knows when to bend the rules for a special case. We just had another who says she can not take any calls at all unless they are prearranged. I wonder if that includes a call from some hospital to tell you your entire family was just in a train wreck. Sorry, the call wasn’t predeclared. So we have two people who work in prisons that have two different outlooks.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. It’s not that I can’t take any calls, it’s that I can’t possess a cell phone inside the jail. ( BTW, I am not a correction officer). If I need to get a phone call telling me that my entire family was in a train wreck , the prearrangement would be that they call the phone in the office , rather than my cell which must be locked in my car.
If it comes down to my wife answering the phone and being fired over it, and the Principle taking it from her…I’ll opt for the take-away, thank you. But to me, you’re positing a situation wherein she has taken total leave of her senses…sorry, but that’s not a plausible situation for me. If you can think of any scenario in which it would be both possible and plausible, we can talk. But I’m not trying to be evasive…it just doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m not advocating slavish adherence to rules- but I also don’t agree with the idea that policy can largely be ignored and circumvented without impacting the overall credibility of the administration. Special cases can have special treatment- but in this case, I don’t think that the school had the proper information to make the exception at the time of crisis. And who do I blame for that? The student and his parent.
For what it’s worth, grabbing the cell phone was probably not the best reaction on the part of the teacher. But that’s a Monday morning quarterback speaking. With perfect knowledge, I’m sure we can all envision a different approach. However, I think that the administration handled things as well as anyone could have- largely because they could take the required step back to evaluate things. A teacher often does not have that luxury…but unless you want to employ a secondary team of people whose only job it is to patrol the school and police infractions, freeing teachers up to teach, then this is what we’re stuck with.
Conversation is the act of conversing, conversating is the act of having a conversation, conversationizing is the act of conversating, conversationinzation is what you do when you’re conversationizing. Sheesh! doesn’t anyone understandify English nowadays?
Try this. You’re on a plane. On the news, there’s a report that several planes have been taken and that people used their cells to call loved ones. The staff hears this EXCEPT the principle. Your wife’s cell rings.
Let’s say in this bizzarro world, she does answer it and so
the principle grabs the phone from her disconnecting her from you. She is justified to get upset or should you have called the switchboard and hope they page her?
The principle is now aware that planes are crashing into the ground and people are calling their loved ones. Your wife cell phone rings agan…she is not allowed to answer it and is instead told that she is aware that there is a procedure for personal calls and you should call the switchboard.
My question is a. Is that a reasonable response from the administration, which now knows what the situation is?
B. If the principle allowed your wife to answer the phone 2nd time, how is the credibilty of the administration damaged?
If it was me, i wouldn’t trust a receptionist to inform my wife that I wasn’t going to a firey death…but that’s me and I would like to think that I worked in an environment where the adminstration would understand that too…without having a policy specifically written to include calls from people on planes, during a terrorist attack is okay.
Since I don’t have kids (and the more I read the papers, etc. I am SO glad) I have to ask what is probably a dumb question. What ever happened to in-school suspension? The kid had been making F’s and had been making an effort to improve his grades. So he takes a call from his mom in Iraq on his lunch break - the response is to have him miss two weeks of classes. That’s going to help his grades? I was under the impression that the purpose of school was to provide an education. I knew kids when I was in school who misbehaved on purpose to get suspended. A spanking from Mom/Dad? No problem - over in a few minutes and then FREE for two weeks! The middle school where I attended before transferring to a private school used after school detention - if you misbehaved, you had to stay at school LONGER, not get out of it!
Thanks for the clarification, doreen. It’s all good 
The student has admitted he reacted poorly by swearing. The principal and the teacher have apparently not offered any similar admission that they may have over-reacted. And this is part of what I’ve been saying - why isn’t the administration willing to admit it might have been in error as well? Why is the student the only party in this situation being punished for poor judgement?
This story blew up into such a big thing simply because of the “Support Our Troops” mentality. If mom had been overseas working for IBM, this event wouldn’t have rated a blip on anyone’s radar, but because she was in Iraq that justifies all our moral outrage.
The teacher was an “asshole,” because he/she saw a rule of the school being broken, and called the student on it. Teachers take stuff away from kids daily without being verbally abused for it. This kid crossed the line, and then the media slant on the story played up the Iraq connection and made everyone’s knee jerk.
I think the reaction is a little more extreme because of the very real possibility that the kid’s mother may not return home.
I am from Columbus (where this happened) and read that an assistant principal at Spencer has resigned. It was stated that the resignation was not connected to this incident, but a friend of mine that knows the A.P. says that the woman loved her job.
I lost you after this.
You keep insisting on putting me in some sort of weird Cube-like dilemma in an attempt to prove your point. Why not just assume aliens or the rapture while you’re at it?
Look, assuming the Principle is aware of a life and death situation, then I would appreciate some leeway here. This always rejects the fact that if I want to talk to my wife, regardless of the situation, I know to call the school. Even if she were not physically prevented from getting it, due to the policy, my wife keeps the cell phone where, if it rings, she won’t be bothered by it. She doesn’t take it out and look at it. if she were somehow aware that i might need to call, I’m sure she’d clear it with her boss first. Why is that so hard to grasp? This kid was allowed to have a phone on him, as long as it was turned off…if it had been, none of this would be an issue. Mom would have left a message, or perhaps called the school. If he knew she’d call (as seems likely due to the exact timing), he could have asked for special permission from the administration. If they’[d refused, we could talk about them being unreasonable.
As for the second call: If i were the principle, and he was in my office throwing a tantrum, there’s NO WAY I’d give in and hand over the phone.
Yes, his mom is overseas. My wife could die in a horrible car crash on the way home today, or any day for that matter…does this mean we can disregard any of her workplace’s policies about cell phone calls? I tend to agree with mailman- if not for the ‘support our troops’ riff, this would be a non-issue.
Once upon a time, we didn’t have cell phones. There’s no constitutional right to be ‘jacked in’ all of the time with phone and Internet access.
As for Little Nemo- I suspect that the answer to your question is based on the school’s not wanting to leave any window open for legal action. Even assuming they want to, accepting any guilt in this case is just asking for a lawsuit.
You asked for a scenario. I gave you one ripped right out of the headlines…a bit over the top? If you think an alien attack would be enough for your wife to break policy and answer your call, I’m all for that. Should they be greys or greens… are you being “probed”?
Yes I understand your wife’s rules, what I’m trying to do is ask you to place your wife in the same position as this kid, as a rule breaker…but you can’t or won’t do that, because it’ll force you to have a little empathy with the situation; so you go back to, “my wife wouldn’t break the rules, she would do this and this and this” and I believe you. However those things didn’t happen in this case, yes the kid screwed up. Yes it was his fault. Now what?
You’re still concerned with the original sin, ie, that there weren’t any plans made or that he shouldn’t have the phone turned on. All true. Not what? There were no plans made and he used his phone. Now what?
You have a choice. Either deny him the chance to speak to his mom for another 30 days, or allow him the opportunity to speak with her and settle up with him when’s he done and make plans so it doesn’t happen again. The choice is apparent to me and I don’t need the rapture to see what, should have been done…once all the information was known.
You will be punished, but that punishment will be tempered with mercy. You screwed up, but we’re going to show you how not screw up that way again. In some circles, that’s called teaching.
That’s the adult, the decent thing to do. Whether his mom’s overseas or in stuck on the side of the road or falling out of sky.
YMMV, of course.
I wish I could retort that this would be a chickenshit way to run a school, but damn it all, I can’t. Because you’re probably right.
Does the state require you to work in a jail, or did you apply for that job of your own free will? IOW, did you choose to be bound by those rules, or were they forced upon you? That seems like an important difference.
I applied for the job of my own free will, but the rule was instituted after I began it. BTW it’s not my employer’s rule- it’s a rule of the agency which runs the jail. Incidentally, this student was not forced by the government to attend this particular school. In fact , he’s not required to attend any school. He is, after all, 17 and education is compulsory in Georgia between the sixth and sixteenth birthdays.
Good point. OTOH, the same rule presumably applies to students under 16 as well, who have no choice in the matter.
This rule was not just a school rule. The teacher and the principal were following a district rule on cell phone use.
Little Nemo, did the school fail to notify the student of the rules regarding cell phones? Did the teacher and principal use profanity directed at the student? Is there any evidence that they became belligerent? Did they trespass on his territory?
They followed procedures and the directives from the district office. They tried to negotiate. And according to them, the student did not even tell them it was his mother in Iraq until after he was taken to the office. (See later news reports.)
It remains unclear as to whether the young man chose not to talk with his mother when she called again or if he was not allowed to. From my own experience in high schools, I cannot imagine that the student would not have been allowed to speak with her when she called again – especially since the teacher and principal were trying to negotiate with the young man. That wouldn’t make sense.
There is no indication that the teacher intentionally disconnected the phone to begin with. She may have been trying to verify that the caller was the student’s parent when the disconnection occured. If the student had just handed her the phone, she could have checked.
What was it the school was supposed to apologize for? Doing what they were supposed to do according to the Board of Education?
Grabbing the phone out of his hand counts, don’t you think?
From my own experience in high schools, it seems quite likely that they would prevent him from speaking on the phone when it rang a second time, since speaking on the phone was what got him in trouble in the first place. It also seems unlikely that he wouldn’t want to resume the phone conversation that had been interrupted.