I know this has been discussed before but I wanted to ask a question from a different perspective. Here’s a little background first.
Highland Park is an upscale community in the Dallas, TX, area. Last weekend, a party was raided by the police where there were minors drinking. Many of the kids scattered and some of them called home on cell phones to have their parents pick them up. Many parents are upset that the police raided the party and are protecting their kids from possible citations.
Because of Highland Park school district policies (common to many school districts in Texas), being cited for an alcohol or drug offense of any kind means suspension from any extracurricular activities and possibly being suspended from school (depending on the offense). Keep in mind that the offenses occur off school grounds during non-school hours.
Now for the question: Knowing the penalties and consequences of zero-tolerance policies, would you allow your child to receive the punishments dictated, knowing that the records of those punishments would limit the future chances for scholarships and college admissions, or would you protect your kids feeling that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime?
Seeing the draconian punishments handed out because of zero-tolerance, I have to say that I can see instances where I would protect my children from the authorities. That’s not to say they wouldn’t be punished by me. However, many times the punishments don’t fit the crime and can have long-term impacts.
Yes, and children need to learn that the law and justice are not always “fair” in terms of the punishment fitting the crime.
I would rather have them learn that lesson, than learn the lesson the “whatever I do, Mommy and Daddy will cover my ass and take responsibility for me.”
Of course, by high school, they’ve already learned that Mommy and Daddy will protect them, that they can buy their way out of trouble, and that they are too rich, important, and upscale to be held responsible for their actions.
You’re right about the law. If we were talking about the kids getting tickets and learning their lesson, then I wouldn’t have a problem.
The problem I have is that the punishments get piled on. In the case above, a kid would get a ticket from the police with the resulting fines and court costs. In addition, they would be suspended from all extracurricular activities and may possibly have to attend an alternative school for a non-school related offense. In this case, not only are you punishing a kid for the immediate offense, you’re penalizing future opportunities as well.
You do know that Minnesota and one of the Carolina states have passed laws to make it illegal for ANY adult to give alcohol to a minor. I read about it just this morning. So now if you are a parent who thinks that allowing your child to drink and buying it for them under your supervision…in these states YOU are now breaking the law. The ordinances in some instances carry fines up to 1000. They also will make you libel for any damages your child might inflict while under the influence. This may even include not securing your own alcohol under lock and key. Is this Draconian? I don’t know? I guess enjoying alcohol is considered a privledge not a right and might be controlled in this manner. I personally think we’d save more lives if we passed similar laws about guns but hey…these states believe that they have a serious underage alcohol problem.
Any time a minor is in possesion of alcohol, a law has been broken. He either stole it(theft), bought it(sale to minors), or was given it(contributing).
We recently had a case where the cops found a 17 year old downtown with a six-pack, one opened. They took him to the station, and found out he was another cop’s son, so they called his dad in. After talking to his son for about a half hour, the boy said he bought it at some convenience store about ten miles out of town. So then the cops tried to indict the store owner on the probably coerced word of a minor facing a PD charge!
My guess is the kid stole it from his dad in the first place. Justice?
I don’t know what that had to do with the OP, but I guess it shows how the system works.
I have ambivalent feelings about the harsh sanctions concerning alcohol & minors. The problem is, they get to be 21 & have no concept of how to drink responsibly, so they go waaaaaaaay out of control. (I’ve seen much more of this than I care to think about with my friends in college.) I began having wine/beer occasionally with meals in high school, & didn’t end up thinking that binge drinking was a red-hot idea, since I had been practicing responsible drinking.
The way I see it, you have the right to attend school. I don’t think students should be suspended from school for off-campus law-breaking, except in circumstances where the safety of other students is in question (i.e. the kid is arrested for making bombs out of textbooks).
Extracurricular activities are a WHOLE other matter. You do not have the right to participate in them, they are a privelege, often with strict requirements - cheerleaders having to keep their weight within certain guidelines, athletes having to maintain a certain physical condition, etc. I believe that schools have the right to take away priveleges from students who are doing things that reflect badly on the school, just as in some places you can’t be a teacher if you have certain minor offenses on your record that are considered morally bad (like public intoxication).
They get fined? Big deal. Daddy and Mommy pay the fine. Or my allowance gets cut. So what. Does that deprive me of anything? Not really.
But if I can’t play on the soccer team, that’s a real punishment. That’s cutting me off from something I enjoy and from interaction with all my friends who still CAN play soccer, because they weren’t as stupid as me.
I think the school is justified. I condemn the parents who got their kids out of trouble, and who long ago taught their kids that it’s OK to break the law if you’re rich enough. They’ve taught their kids that what’s important is not good behaviour, but not getting caught. It’s not a lesson I would want to impart to my kids, no matter how rich they might (I wish) be.
But does the school have the right to dictate the behaviour of kids when they aren’t in school? I don’t think so. That’s the parent’s job. This type of precedent opens the door to all kinds of abuses. How about dating? Extra-marital sex? Fighting? Other offenses? Why should the school get any say at all in what kids do in their own homes?
The double-punishment issue is real as well. We vote for people who make the laws. If the law states that the punishment for drinking when under-age is X, does a school official really have the right to say that the punishment will be X+Y? Doesn’t that undermine our judicial system?
I have a big problem with zero tolerance rules anyway. I prefer human judgement. Zero Tolerance, if you ask me, is a school board’s way of copping out. If they admitted that they would use their judgement to decide each case, then they open themselves up for criticism every time they take a stand on a controversial subject. So instead, they hide behind ‘zero tolerance’. Zero tolerance means no one is responsible for decision-making.
The list of abuses under zero-tolerance policies is long. There was a little girl who was expelled from a school under zero-tolerance because she gave a friend one of her Aspirin for a headache, in violation of the zero-tolerance drug policy. There was another kid expelled because he had a keychain with a tiny little pocket knife on it in violation of the no-weapons policy of the school. Both of these kids were excellent students with no history of any behavioural problems.
The question posed was, I thought, whether the parents were right in helping the kids evade the punishment because they thought it was excessive.
The question of whether the school policy itself is fair, that’s a different topic. If the parents want to change the school policy, there are routes for doing that, and for raising the issue with the School Board and Principal and whatever. But, IMHO, that’s got nothing to do with whether you help your kids sneak out from under a policy that you think is excessive.
Suppose that I think my kid has too much homework, and that’s unfair. Should I do it for him? or help him find ways to cheat to get it done (like, copy from an obscure essay somewhere that the teacher likely won’t know about)?
There are right ways and wrong ways to go about seeking change. IMHO, the parents who help their kids cheat are teaching their kids that it’s OK to evade responsbility. Those kids are learning (by watching the parental example) one way to cope with society.
The parents who attend the school board meetings to present their views that the current policies are too strict, are teaching their kids a very different lesson about how to live in society.
[personal aside] I also live in a different Highland Park, that was similarly upscale. When our kids were growing up, we had to deal with those types of parents all the time; the wives rich bitches and husbands lawyers or doctors of unbounded arrogance, who knew how to spend money to evade responsibility. Bah. [/personal]
A question. Especially for you CKDextHavn. Your posts seem to contain a fair amount of negativity about wealthy kids being bailed out by “mommy and daddy”. Not, that I’m against that or anything. However, what about poorer children. I think it’s more likely that zero-tolerance policies are going to be enacted in more urban/poorer/strugling schools. In that case I see the argument that they do much more harm than good. If you pull these kids out of extraciricular activities, they will most likely not stop drinking, whatever. In fact it will likely intesify. In that respect I am firmly against zero-tolerance policies. Pulling a strugling kid out of school is not going to help anyone. They’re kids, it’s unlikely they will think about the punishment before engaging in the activities, it won’t stop anything.
I’m not advocating an avoidance of punishment. I think the kids should be punished by the police if caught or by the parents if not.
ck - It looks like you’re argument for the school district is “You’re not being good parents so we’re going to make sure your kid gets punished until we’re satisfied.” You’re right about extracurricular activities. If my kid joins football and signs a letter saying “If you’re caught drinking, you’re off the team,” then they’re aware of the penalties and have agreed to them. If they get caught, too bad.
However, I do have a problem with a student being suspended and sent to an alternative school for the same offense. What does that teach the kid? If it’s a choice between having my kids stay in honors classes to get a good education versus being suspended for a couple of weeks and not getting the same level of education, I’m going to protect them. Their education is much more important than the punishment the school wants to impose.
My opinion on this is very black and white. If the kids are aware that there are draconian consequences to their actions and choose to undertake them anyway, then they should have to suffer the consequences. Even if a school had a policy that said “if we catch you drinking ONCE we will expel you” and the kid knew of that policy and broke it, he or she IMO should be expelled. Assuming the sactions imposed by the school are not illegal, it seems to me that people old enough to go out unsupervised and get drunk or high are old enough to realize that such actions have consequences and that “it’s not fair!” will not prevent negative consequences from occurring out here in the real world. I also think that it is wrong for schools, parents, or anyone to place kids in a position of having to decide whether a threat of punishment is real or not, or of having to decide whether the parents/school is really serious when it says a particular action will not be tolerated.
When I was a teen, my father made it very clear to me that if I chose to drink and I was caught – by him or the authorities, be they school or police – the sanctions would be severe. (I believe “the end of the world as you know it” was the phrase used.) I was not under any impression that he might be anything less than dead serious; I knew he was. And if I had engaged in that behavior (or, to be more honest, if I had been caught), I would not have whined about the harshness of the sanctions. I knew they’d be harsh going in. Making informed decisions and living with the consequences of them are a big part of growing up IMO.
Parents who help their children evade responsibility for their actions are not doing their kids a favor, even if they do not consider the consequences they are trying to avoid unfair. I know that when I was younger, whenever I realized I could get away with something I would see how much further I could push it, it’s natural to test the limits of your freedom at that age, to learn where the boundaries are. The longer you delay teaching responsibility for your actions, the further from what is acceptable behavior your children will stray.
One of the greatest things about getting older in a small town is seeing the world turn against the spoiled brats who always got their way when they were younger. There comes a point where your parents can’t help you, and I don’t feel sorry for the parents of the troublemaker who had to sell their house and move to a trailer park to pay for lawyers for their 22 year old son who is still acting like a 13 year old. And I didn’t feel bad for their son when I heard about him getting 6 teeth knocked out and a bar of soap shoved into his rectum during his expensive reduced sentence.
Maybe people would feel differently if the subject weren’t alcohol or drug abuse?
When my son was 15, an inner city student, the state initiated some “zero tolerance” measures. One was on “weapons” (felony prosecution and mandatory 1 year expulsion from the school) and the other was for what they called “verbal violence” (to verbally threaten the person would be expelled).
There was another student who was selling drugs on school property. when he was caught and searched, he claimed (falsely) that the crack pipe that he had in his possesion really belonged to my son. So, my son was taken to the office, his backpack and locker were searched. They found in his backpack and confiscated the following as “weapons”:
A set of needlenosed pliers (which he used to put the leads into his mechanical pencil) and a “swiss army” type wrench that had as attachements a pair of scissors (about one inch in length), and a bottle opener.
He was suspended for 3 days, and threatened with prosecution. Yes, I helped him fight that. I felt that to classify the items he had (which were both used for in school projects) as weapons was absurd. They pointed out that the bottle opener part could be jabbed into some one. I answered “so can a pen, so can a nail file, so can a metal ruler, so can a set of keys.” If he’d been caught with the items in his hand during a fight, fine. But they were in his zippered up backpack. If he had been prosecuted, the school board was REQUIRED to expell him for a year. With this action taken by the school, my son, an honors student, became suicidal.
Now, do I always help my son fight school discipline? No.
As a matter of fact, in general, he doesn’t have to worry about what the SCHOOL will do, he has to worry about what I will do. There have even been times when the school was willing to overlook something and I insisted on consequences. But when I believe the school is overreacting or wrong, yes, I will step in.
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily call it dictating their behavior, but the school definitely has the right to punish the kids for what they do when they aren’t in school. It’s very much like life.
If I get busted for drug possession or some such thing, I’m going to get fired. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t doing this at work. It matters that I broke the policies of where I work. If the school sets certain rules, they can definitely respond with sanctions against those who break them.
I too object to “zero tolerance” policies. This doesn’t necessarily have the bite of a really egregious zero tolerance act, though. It’s not as if they were sick and had some cough syrup and were suspended. These kids were flagrantly breaking both the rules of their school and the law.
wring, your case doesn’t really seem like this one. Yours is more of a “clueless administrators can’t see that this damn thing is a tool and not a weapon” sort of thing. If he had actually had a hunting knife stashed in his locker, your reponse would have been, I suspect, completely different.
WRING, the obvious difference is that your son was disciplined for carrying things that were not in fact weapons, or that he did not know the school would consider weapons. Would you still have defended him if he had been caught with an actual weapon? The question, as I read it, was not whether you should assist your child when he’s being punished unjustly, but whether you should shield your child when he’s being punished justly but, you believe, too harshly. I think that if the kid was aware of the consequences going in, then he has to take his medicine. In your case, your son wasn’t aware of the consequences of carrying pliers and a pocket knife, because he had no reason to believe the school would consider those tools to be weapons.
Guess I should have elaborated. Necros and Jodi, yes, I know it’s different to a degree.
However, I have always been VERY careful about what he took to school, and he’s aware of it - to the extent that I called before sending a plastic knife with his lunch (and believe it or not, NO he wasn’t allowed to have a plastic knife). So, frankly, if I’d seen those in his backpack, I’d have told him to take them out.
the point to me, was when you have a zero tolerance policy, it takes you to absurdities.
So, for example, a zero tolerance on alcohol, could mean, depending on the test used that a student would be disciplined for taking Nyquil (at 25% alcohol, you’re basically taking a shot of 50 proof). At the correction center, we didn’t allow Nyquil types of stuff 'cause in some circumstances there might be a false positive for alcohol.
the zero tolerance on drugs have led to a kid being suspended for taking a vitamin on campus.
So, my answer would be a qualified: I would defend my child if found guilty under a zero tolerance policy for an absurdity. Not for a real offense (so for the knife, he’d have been on his own.)
Let’s be realistic. You are only mentioning half of the story. You are not mentioning the part about the warehouse party in Deep Ellum near the end of the last school year. The guidelines where set out then because there were minors drinking (the person who supplied much of the booze is in some serious trouble). The school district made their rules clear, and many obviously chose to disregard them.
Now for the question: Knowing the penalties and consequences of zero-tolerance policies, would you allow your child to receive the punishments dictated, knowing that the records of those punishments would limit the future chances for scholarships and college admissions, or would you protect your kids feeling that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime?
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First of all, everyone knew what the rules were and what the penalties for breaking the rules were. Second, banishment from extra-curricular activities means no sports, no band and no debate club. It doesn’t mean they can’t take their regular classes and graduate like anyone else. Third, there is no such thing as a permanent record. Forth, you are right, the punishment does not fit the crime. The kids are getting off easy. If you don’t believe me just look at Plano where heroin has taken a huge toll on people 21 and under.
WRING, I see the distinction you’re making and I agree with it. The “zero tolerance” that I was referring to was not of type (anything that might be construed as a weapon, no matter how innocuous; anything that might qualify as a drug, no matter how common-place) but rather of quantity or frequency. In other words, assuming we’re talking about real weapons or drugs, I do not consider “I only had one” or “I only did it once” to be a valid excuse. The complaints I hear about zero tolerance are usually of this latter variety: “She was suspended and she’d never done a single thing wrong before!” “He was kicked off the football team when he only had one beer!” “I can’t believe the school won’t let them go through graduation when they were just trying to blow off steam with a little party.” “Well, he always carries a knife and probably didn’t even remember it was in his backpack.” That sort of excuse is the type that elicits a “cry me a river” response from me, but that is not inconsistent with thinking you’re right as well.