Why was this kid in trouble?

Great Debates
1

I read a message from a kid on another board, who is 16 and was expelled from school and is all angry about it. (Yes, there is life on the WEB other than the SDMB.) For one thing, he was wearing a shirt with the name of a Rock band on it that, according to him, some other kid complained about. He was hauled in for offensive material. (?!) While there, they went through his notebooks and discovered that he had written some Vampyre Poetry (Gothic stuff), had drawn some stick figures in assorted phases of fighting and a few daggers or some such.

He was suspended from school for a day, his parents were called, he has to set up sessions with a psychological counselor because the school shrink says he has violent tendencies (as displayed by his drawings), some antisocial tendencies (as displayed by his shirt) and might be leaning towards the ‘dark side’ (as determined by his poetry). Plus, he has to check in X number of times with the assistant principal. He was upset about all of this, claiming that he’s seen girls wearing the same shirt he wore (two other posters confirmed it), he was just writing poetry, just doodling and now everyone thinks he’s some kind of a monster-to-be and he’s thinking about suing the school. (Or getting his folks to do it.)

I thought about this for a bit and recalled my years in school. I decided that he has a valid point. Kids walk by my place from school a lot and they have all sorts of shirts on. (Ever notice how through the years, the boys have begun to dress like crap and look like fools, while the girls always manage to dress cute and look nice?) In my school, if we wore anything offensive, it would have to tick off a lot of people and be racist or of some form of religious slam or radical, like suggesting people burn their draft cards.

A lot of us wrote ‘heartbreakingly sad or gravely grim’ poetry, usually pretty bad, usually tossed away by the end of the year. The girls were real good at that, especially concerning assorted rock stars, hopeful, loving hearts and desperately longing dreams. Some guys also.

I figure that out of the male population in my high school, maybe 10% did not have a notebook without a gun, knife, ax or cannon drawn on it. (Hey! TV was still fighting WW2 and Vietnam was going on. Toy stores sold war kits.) A friend and I used to draw stick figures that we cheerfully murdered off on the most hideous ways possible and laughed hilariously over them. (Now, I don’t know why, but I recall them being tremendously funny then.) When bored, guys drew race cars, jet aircraft, Navy ships, submarines, missiles, machine guns, mock battles, and, the favorite, nuclear explosions. Some drew Motorcycle gang symbols on their folders and wore jack boots and slicked back hair to school. Some drew pot leaves.

You know, I figure that not more than 2% of my class took that stuff any further than that, less than I’d say 4% wound up with a criminal record because of those things. The nuts we had were mostly genuine nuts to begin with and the few who turned out to be bad seeds later were pretty well headed that way before they got into high school.

None of us would have been jacked up by the school the way this kid had been. Kids will be kids. Why have we lost control of our schools and let the lawyers and the politicians take over? This is all PC garbage. Gun-shy? Probably. Over reacting? Probably. Appropriate and mature action? Probably not.

Sometimes I like to read the school message boards to learn what today’s kids really think and it certainly doesn’t seem to match the news reports.

I considered this after reading Drain Beads post on first graders and booze identification.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=40888

Kids in the local high school now have to bring transparent back packs to carry books in to clearly show that they’re not packing heat. The only violence in my area on school grounds in about 100 years has been a few fist fights. Even in the end of segregation, no one used weapons, though the behind the bike rack fights went up a tad after school for a bit.

I thought I had a solution, but when I prowled around some information sites, I decided that I was in error because it turns out I was blaming lax discipline on the parents. According to new statistics, 61% of parents spank their kids no matter what the law says. I came up with another solution, but that would mean fighting the litigious community we seem to have developed nation wide and I don’t have the strength to do that.

Oh, when will the era of Political Correctness end!?

2

It’s just sad. That we have so little trust or respect for people like this. Stories like this are depressing, but luckily not the norm. Stories like this suck, but in the end, high school seems to me to be relatively open. In the end, people are allowed to be who they want to be. There is not as much animosity between “goths and preps.” The lines are not that simple. There is no black and white.

Damnit, now I am rambling.

3

This is absolute bullshit, that school psychiatrist isn’t worth the paper his pay cheque is made of. Pretty much everyone goes through some stage of teenage depression and creative writing is an excellent way to relieve stress and tension, I’ve been doing the exact same thing since I was 13. I hate situations like this.

4

At the Adolescent In-Patient Mental Health unit that I work at, quite often the kids will do just that, and it’s considered therapeutic.

5

Skribbler: Was this kid going to a public school or a private school? And how did his one-day suspension turn into getting expelled?

6

Public school and I don’t know how it turned into his being expelled. He was pretty ticked off when he posted his message and didn’t say.

7

I think that the school over-reacted just a tad. But at the same time, given the violence that has broken out in the schools over the last few years, I think that administrators are running scared at this point. Just imagine, for a moment, that they had done nothing about this situation, and in a few months, or even next year, had developed inot a Columbine-like situation.

How many people who fwould protest the kid’s suspension/expulsion would be screaming for the administrators’ collective heads because nothing had been done. The schools are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

8

Ankh_Too, you are missing the entire point. most, if not all, kids do this. if the principal really wanted to take action, there are many more effective methods to pursue. this is the laziest and cheapest way to go.

and that, in my mind (besides all of the pesky constitutional violations) is a big problem.

jb

9

Do you remember which band was on his shirt?

10

No, actually, I’m not missing the entire point. I do realize that a lot of adolescents engage in these activities. I did. But then again, I don’t consider myself a paragon of mental health during my high-school years either. But, by the same token,back in the days of yore, when I graduated high school, no one had really considered the possibility that someone would come in and try to massacre a large part of the student body.

Let’s also bear in mind that we have a secondhand account of one side of the story. I don’t know what happened that would have triggered such an extreme reaction from the school. I did say, in my intitial post, that I felt the administrators had over-reacted, given the details we’ve heard so far. So far, it’s an anonymous rock band t-shirt. But what if it was a t-shirt for one of the bands on Resistance Records? The OP describes the written material as **“Vampyre Poetry (Gothic stuff)”**but what if it was more specific and graphic than that implies? If it spoke of the joys of draining the blood of people in the school? I’m not saying that this is what happened, only that we don’t have a lot of information and the information we do have is somewhat vague.
There may be a lot of ways to address the problem, there may not be, it’s open for debate. But even if we stipulate that there are options that will work, most schools do not have the resources in place to take advantage of them.

11

If I can dig up the message again, their board is a real pain in the butt to negotiate, not like this one, I’ll let you know. The kid did say that he knew of at least one girl wearing the same shirt to school and nothing happened to her. He felt that boys were being singled out.

If those instructors had ever seen the notebooks of me and my friends, they’d have rushed us out of school in a padded wagon, with armed guards. We fought WW2 in pencil and with not very good art when bored in class. We slaughtered the enemy by the hundreds in ghastly ways. (I was pretty good at drawing fighter jets and bombers.)

One friend of mine made an 8 inch, functional brass cannon in metal shop. Beautiful little thing! It actually fired. We got the gunpowder from bullets and fire crackers. It would shoot the head of a .22 cartridge 50 feet. He showed it off all over the place and no one thought he was a menace.

We all carried pocket knives because everyone did. I carried a Scout Knife.

Those ugly little CAR-toons critters, RatFinks were all over the place. We could carry smokes on school grounds, but better not get caught smoking them. (The restrooms were often about as cloudy as a London fog from kids sneaking a smoke and if a teacher walked in, by the time he could clear his eyes, the sound of buts being flushed down the cans muffled anything he said and probably lowered the local water pressure for a bit.)

12

It’s not surprising, considering we live in a Prozac and Ritalin nation, where everybody is supposed to be happy and perfect, and peace love and happiness. So sad that people get attacked for wearing a rock music T-shirt and writing depressing poetry. The “violent drawings” were probably like the ones my bro drew in 4th grade, but nobody got him for that.

Now is the time when the song Subdivisions by Rush seems most appropriate “Subdivisions, in the high school halls, in the shopping malls, Conform or be cast out”

13

Teen-agers will continue to write depressing poetry for as long as teen-agers continue not to get laid enough.

14

I dispute the whole notion that schools are more violent than they used to be. A couple of shootings within a couple of years in a nation of 300 million people comes under the category of ‘statistical noise’. If anything, we make the situation worse by giving so much media attention to this nonexistant ‘crisis’, thereby increasing the chance of a copycat shooting.

But still… There are tens of thousands of schools across the nation. Your odds of being shot in a school are much, much lower than your odds of being killed on the car ride there. The fear of weapons in schools today is way, way overblown. And even if the danger were more real, it wouldn’t justify the bunker mentality going on.

15

The fear of weapons is partly the media’s fault, I think. (I’m speaking as a journalist, btw.)

People die every day. People die in thousands of common ways- heart attacks, car crashes, murder… but school shootings? They hit at several nerves: the education system and its flaws, the rarity of the events, the “innocence” of children, and the shock and tragedy surrounding them.

I don’t think that schools have gotten more violent- i think that the nature of the violence has changed from fistfights to knifes to guns.

I think the “bunker mentality” (good phrase, btw) is partly because of an idea of what a school has control over. Following public outcry, something needs to be done… so administration cracks down on students, often in absurd ways that don’t focus on the actual problem. In their rush to identify “problem children,” a lot of schools are missing the big picture and ignoring the leap from being unhappy and picked on in school to shooting people.

16

andygirl

Excellent evaluation. I absolutely agree. When kids fought in school, it was fists. No weapons. Later, after the Kung Fu crap started, then feet were added. Kids fought after school and it was not all that unusual for one to get his butt beaten, vow to get even and try again later on and get it thoroughly tromped again. Still, fists only.

There were few fights, mostly by gangs (totally unlike the gangs of today) where clubs and knives were used, but the gangs were rare. They usually kept to themselves also, not claiming territory, shooting at people, running drugs or doing major theft.

I think TV has played a major role in this, showing kids how easy it is to kill from a distance without getting stomped in the process. Kids who normally would get their butts beaten in a fist fight now grab a gun. Most of the time, if a kid got his butt beat, that was it. Now, far too many go home, get a gun and shoot their attacker.

17

What percentage of schools in the U.S. have ever been the subject of a SINGLE shooting? How about a knifing?

The answer is - a vanishingly small percentage. It’s simply not a general problem. In some bad areas it is, but these rules are being applied in schools that have not had a weapon attack in their entire history.

18

Come on. When I was in 4th grade a teacher sent me to the counselers office for writing disturbing stories. The counseler, luckily, realised there was nothing wrong with them, and sent me back to class. Idiocy. While I was in school, kids made functioning guilotines, self-immolating pieces of art, I wrote a short story making fun of child sexual abuse (trust me, it was in bad taste, but it had several specific points), and accidentally set the school on fire. None of these things got me ejected from school. I also came to school drunk, doped up, high, and injected various substances in the basement after school. I was also given access to many chemicels that I could have easily constructed large explosive devices out of. And yet I was never suspended, expelled, or any of that crap. (there was one occasion, but that was outside of school). Let kids be kids. School violence is down, repressing them does nothing to help, and only harms self expression.

19

OLDSCRATCH:

And you’re sure you’re not in prison now?:slight_smile:

That 6 year old who got suspended from school for smooching a 6 year old girl was overkill. The principal, in response to the media blitz, stated that she had to follow the State guidelines of sexual harassment. No, she didn’t. She could have turned a blind eye and so could the teacher who hauled the little kid in.

First graders smooch and hug, cling together and give each other slaps. Big deal. Like, any of them have any sexual urges at that time. I think some of the problem is that the writers of the rules forget that they were kids, plus they have a herd of lawyers getting involved because if they forget something, there are scores of people out there ready to sue at the drop of a period.

20

Wasn’t this just talked about a few days ago? but IIRC some kids stole the notebook? Any ho’ when I was in school if someone wore a shirt that had something “wrong” with it they made the student turn it inside out. I remember people with the skeletons in different possitions and an Iron Maiden shirt that had Fooker, a WWII plane, written on the back with a couple of bullit holes to make it look like “fucker”.

I also remember in HS they gave us a survey and they asked how many brought weapons to school. I think around 80% said that at one time they did. I don’t imagine much has changed in the last 10 years or so.