I know that most teachers are good people, and want only to educate. I even had several excellent teachers in my schooling. Of course all of them were in private schools after it became necessary for my parents to pull me out of the public schools. I know, too, that my experiences shouldn’t be used as a yardstick for judging all stories I hear about school idiocies. After all, not all school disctricts tolerate and protect a teacher who chooses (apparantly at random) one student each year to be her metaphorical punching bag. But sometimes it’s hard to remember that.
Which is one reason I’m trying to keep my criticisms of the school in question as specific as possible.
Very cool! I wish you’d gotten the egg laying, too.
It would make sense for a professional to evaluate the kid. The school does seem to be overreacting, if the situation is being accurately stated by the parents. I can’t believe it would be such an extreme punishment for just this, though. Not because schools are inherently good and fair, mind you, but because of the fear of lawsuits and bad publicity.
Think about it-- the district has said nothing at all about the case, because they can’t. The only people talking are the parents. Do you think you’ve got all the information? Unlikely. VERY unlikely. The district cannot blab about the kid’s history. The parents can say whatever they want and try to win this one in the press. The school should have called the police? People would have freaked about that as an overreaction, too, so that’s a bullshit criticism. The school didn’t give the kid counseling? What if they recommended that the parents get the kid counseling? What if they called home on the kid’s behavior before? We don’t know. The linked article only has the parent’s POV, which you have to admit is slanted.
Believe what you will, for a district to nail a kid’s ass to a board like this, something major must being involved here. The district would not stick its neck out like this if there wasn’t. If they did, then they’re going to be sorry, though I’m sure they are already.
Pissing match? What? I’m disagreeing with you in the Pit in pretty mild terms. Don’t get all weird on me now.
The stupidity of schools comes from… well, it’s probably leaking in from all over the place, and NOT to look to the community is pretty unfair and likely inaccurate. This is not to say there aren’t draconian and overly harsh administrators out there who mete out unfair and ridiculous punishments, or jerkish teachers. Of course there are. But they don’t draft these ZT policies. They get handed them and then go wild enforcing them.
Wait, who does the smear campaigns, and against whom? I can’t parse this paragraph for meaning, honestly, because of your unclear referents.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I said. :rolleyes: There are bad teachers and administrators, just as their are bad everythings. HOWEVER. If your problem is with ZT policies, as stated in your thread title, please place blame on the proper people for their creation, which is the school boards who write and hand down these policies-- an elected body made of community members, the same ones who freak out later when their RO-meters get tipped. Likely the ball was dropped in many places for something like this to occur. OR the parents are bullshitting and distorting the situation. Possibly a combination.
Also, not for nothing, I hear a lot a lot a LOT of railing against teachers and administrators on these boards and it makes a person defensive, you do understand that. It’s getting pretty old.
Are we even sure that the drawing was meant to look like a gun? To me, it looks more like a building, complete with windows, and a few people around, drawn to scale.
I don’t agree with you, here. For a family without resources it can still be very hard to bring a suit against an official entity like a school district. Do you recall the story from earlier this year about the family of atheists who were being persecuted because their daughter wouldn’t participate in prayers at school? While the lawsuit about the school’s behavior seems to be a slam-dunk, it has taken some two years to litigate, while the family had to arrange other schooling, IIRC, for their daughter.
I do agree that all we have is the parent’s version of what happened, and that is a biased source. But, in the absence of other data, I’m not prepared to assume that the school is acting in a rational manner.
I didn’t mean that it was an uncivil match - just that we’re starting to trade anecdotes that have only marginal connection to the point we’d been talking about. And that we’re both feeling very personal about the positions we’re staking out. I don’t want to let this devolve into name-calling or ad homenum attacks, that was all I’d meant by the expression.
For me, when I think of pissing match, the way I think of the expression is that it’s a contest to see who can piss the most, or piss furthest. A stupid, and silly contest of one-upsmanship. Until you called me on it, I forgot that some people think of pissing match in terms of other expressions: “Pissing on his Wheaties,” or worse.
Agreed here 100%.
Sorry. You’re right, I didn’t give enough background to make that coherent.
I’d meant this to illustrate that it’s not always easy to enact a change in the school board if the school administration and teachers are against that proposed change. My parents tried to change the school board at the school district I was in, because of what they saw as abusive behavior by the teachers that was being tolerated by the board. They got some support from the community, but the local teacher’s union went all out to make it an issue about “cutting quality teaching” to the kids in the district, rather than trying to police bad teachers. And packed the town meeting with people who came in for just that one issue, and then left.
After seeing how impossible it would be to enact a change in that school district against the will of the teacher’s union and the administrators, my parents caved - it wasn’t a fight they were willing to put the resources in to win.
You implied that changing a school board was easy, and that the teachers and administration would accept the will of the electorate. I’d meant to suggest that often they will act to control the terms of debate during election cycles, for the benefit of their own concerns. Which may, or may not, be the students.
Very often it seems to me that school boards enact policies, including ZT policies, at the requests and with the advice of the teachers and administrators.
How else can I interpret this line, but as an attempt to say that the teachers and administration are passive victims of policy from the school boards?
I read that as a very clear attempt to put all the accountability for the policies on the school board and the people of the district.
Again, I’ll agree with this in general. I’m not convinced that this is an accurate description of the case in point.
I do understand that. And I’m sorry that it feels like I’m trying to attack you, or even teachers in general, with my criticisms. I don’t want to do that. I’ve made an effort to keep my comments about the events in the article as specific as possible, for that reason. I think that the events are illustrative of the problems with Zero Tolerance policies, but I don’t mean to draw many conclusions beyond that about teachers, or public schooling, in general because of that.
I’m not likely to agree with your defense of this situation based on what seems to be inferred interpretations - your thesis seems to boil down to “It would be stupid for this to be the whole of the story, so it’s fair to assume there’s more than this behind what happened.” I agree that it would be stupid, but I’m also aware that people and groups of people sometimes behave stupidly when they get annoyed.
To be honest, the side of the story that I really want to hear is the one from the other student who was suspended at the same time for what appeared to have been the same offense: handing in a picture of a gun. The family of the second boy didn’t care to talk to the newspaper, from what I recall. That two students seem to have done the same thing, at the same time, suggest to me more that two kids were being smartasses, rather than anything else.
At first glance I agree with you, it didn’t seem to be obviously a gun, until I noticed the trigger near the hand grip that the two stick-figures are dangling from. It’d be hard to explain that curved line being intended as anything but the trigger of a gun.
I think it looks like an aerial view of a building with skylights. Clearly, what this child needs, is…drawing lessons. When I draw gun, you better believe you know I am threatening you with a well drawn gun!
Since I haven’t watched SNL in about 150 years, replace generic labels with appropriate actors
<scene, teachers lounge>
teacher - “So, I asked them to turn in their homework and this kid draws a gun…”
principal - “What? A kid pulled a gun in class? We have to stop him”
teacher - “No, wait. He just drew a gun…”
principal - “Well, thank god he didn’t shoot. But we still can’t allow that kind of behavior…”
teacher - “Who are you calling? 911? But all he did was…”
Three things that make me so glad I was a kid in the 70’s:
1: The Six Million Dollar Man
2: No seat belt/child car seat laws
3: No zero-tolerance bullshit
I’d like to thank my mother for packing away a couple of the drawing books that I was never without back in grade school. If not for her, I couldn’t have given you this prime example of why I’d have been booted out faster than you could say “Columbine”.
Judging by the amount of Star Wars/Close Encounters drawings in that book, I’ll put that one at around 1978, when I was roughly 10 years old. Every other page is space battles or laser gun fights – exploding spaceships and bodies strewn all over the map.
Yeah, something tells me that I shouldn’t have my daughter bring this book in for show and tell down the road.
Huh…never noticed before that the position of the trigger would make that one difficult rifle to fire…
Actually, if you look closely you can see that someone is being hanged from the bottom of the giant gun where the trigger would be.
Clearly, the student intends to build a three story tall model of a gun and, in an ironic twist, use it to hang his victims from.
There also appears to be a small child stranded on the top of the three story gun. I hope police have been mobilized to save this child before he falls or starves.
1: We seem to be about the same age
2: I wouldn’t have made it past 4th grade if they kicked us out for drawing guns (or fighter plane battles, or space battles, or people gunned down by aliens, or …)
3) I once brought a realistic reproduction of an HK94 to high school for the theater people to use in a play, I had to keep it under my desk. I think they’d arrest a kid doing the same thing today.
Usually, the threat of bad publicity alone gets them to be more flexible. In this case, it already has-- the suspension was reduced from 5 days to 3.
Based on only the parents’ rabid defense of their little angel, I’m not prepared to assume that he is completely innocent and that’s all there is to the story.
I wasn’t trading anecdotes with you. I was telling you where the ZT policies come from-- not from teachers, that’s for sure, and administrators on a school level do not write district policy. The community that’s outraged over this should look in the mirror, if their problem is with a ZT policy that’s been enforced accurately by the school.
If a school’s administrators and teachers were against a stupid ZT policy and fought against it, you’d praise them for their good sense, right? So I’m not sure what you’re talking about, here. You’re actually getting into a personal anecdote about something that happened to you that isn’t really relevant to this discussion, so I’m not going to get into it with you about it, because that’s where things go off the rails in these conversations IME.
Changing a school board is actually pretty easy, IF you can get people out to vote. People just do not give a crap and the voting rates are pretty low in school board elections. People don’t know who the candidates are or why one is better than the other, unless they read the newspaper and give a crap. Thus, it’s the people with the strong agendas who get more say in these elections because they’re motivated to vote. If you don’t care and don’t vote, and wind up with an elected body of morons, whose fault is that? This can be said about the whole country, not just local school boards, obviously.
Cite?
I doubt any administrator wants the aggravation and publicity of standing behind some chart with infractions on one side and punishments on the other, and not having any discretion in discipline and enforcement. That may not be the case here, I just don’t know, since the school can’t say anything about the case. Like I said, I’m sure everyone involved screwed up somehow. It’s just that school boards rarely get mentioned in these discussions-- it’s all railing against admins and teachers.
No, it boils down to, you only have one side of the story. You admit that. So why assume that you know everything you need to know in order to decide who was right and who was wrong? Because you have an axe to grind with public schools, maybe? I don’t know. In any case, I personally would reserve judgment without the school’s side of the story, as I would in any situation where I only knew half of what went on. YMMV.
For some reason, reading that link reminded me of an incident from my childhood.
I grew up in Pasadena, Texas. In junior high (which must’ve been 1980 or 1981), a kid brought a gun to school and held a math class hostage. He held the gun on the teacher for about an hour, before finally giving himself up.
The weird thing is that it happened while we were in school. They didn’t empty the building, and most of us didn’t know anything about it until well after the fact. I don’t know what happened to the kid, but I do know that it just wasn’t that big a deal. I think the local paper talked about it.
Nowadays, of course, it would’ve been a media circus. I’m sure the SWAT team would’ve arrived to whisk everyone out of the school. I’m pretty certain there would’ve been counseling offered to all the students, and I’m sure some of the students in the class would’ve ended up on the Today show.
Similarly, going to the AFT website, gets me things like this speech, titled simply “Zero Tolerance.”
Or this one, which claims that Zero Tolerance policies work.
ETA: Let me make it clear, I’m not against hammering students who engage in violent or threatening behavior. I just don’t see a sketch of a gun, handed in with homework, as being a threat. And justifying punishments for that because of a “Zero Tolerance” policy against gun violence is a pretty damned far reach.
