Does it sound reasonable to you to arrest and handcuff a 10-year-old girl and take her to the police station and suspend her from school for five days because a pair of scissors was found in her bookbag? Not only that but the school district still has to decide whether "to expel her to a disciplinary school." This is the so-called "zero tolerance" policy at work in our publicly-funded government schools.
This contrasts with what my 18-year-old son reports from his high school. He claims to see fights between girls in which the combatants roll around on the floor doing various hurtful things to one another. He claims that when male teachers see this activity they walk on by. It's the female teachers that intervene. He also claims that if he were to step in and try to break up the fight he, himself, would be subject to disciplinary action by the school.
2 comments:
This reminded me of something that happened when I was a kid. My older sister had a killer cough for a long time -- nothing else, just a dry, hacking cough. They tried everything and nothing worked. Finally, in desperation, THE DOCTOR told my mom had to mix the whiskey, lemon, honey mix and it worked. The school even let her bring it to school afte the doctor wrote a letter. Can you imagine that happening today? The kid would just have to hack up a lung. :(
Susan,
Oh, I don't know. The schools are used to dealing with controlled substances if they've got all the proper paperwork. I spoke to my stepson's then-7th grade teacher about the yearly overnight field trip for the kids in that grade to a nearby resort. He said that 25 years ago the only medications they had to worry about were those for infections and such. Now, he said, they take a carload of psychoactive drugs for all the new age ailments that have cropped up in adolescents and that bedevil teachers nowadays.
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