I promised this week's blogs would be dedicated to education, and I'll admit I was wondering how to close off this week with a "bang", so to speak. I know there are a myriad of things that I could cover--funding, teachers' pay scales, teaching techniques, choosing colleges, the ACT/SAT, bullying, internet learning, the importance of a high school diploma, why get a trade or university education after high school...I could go on forever. Picking one was driving me nuts and giving me writer's block. Then like a Sign out of nowhere: "Teenager arrested for picking up drunken friend from a party". Wow! Really?!?! I know that society has gotten a little ridiculous with our laws and I'm not sure if it's trickling down to the kids, it's across the board or if our society is breeding it into our kids so that it will permeate all walks of our lives, their lives and generations to come. I just can't imagine punishing a good student with proven leadership abilities for answering a text from a drunken friend and after getting off work picking up that friend and getting them home safely. That's the story in a nutshell. When I was this girl's age, there were six of us drunk pulled over because one of us was in the ditch puking. One of our town's cops pulled up behind us and realized that we were all snookered. He pulled the car into a nearby parking lot after another cop arrived, and the two of them took us home to our families. It was not a pretty sight in any of our homes. There was no such thing as designated drivers, although there were laws in place for drunk driving thanks to MADD, but it was really still at the officer's discretion how to handle the situation. My friend had her car taken from her by her parents for the duration of the school year and the rest of us varied from grounded for a couple weeks to an *ss whooping for at least one of the guys. Was that enough? Perhaps, perhaps not, but I don't think that's the point. The officer and our parents were trusted to make a decision on what punishments would be doled out. Now, the officer would have to take us all in; he/she has little discretion when it comes to alcohol laws. Our parents would have to get attorneys. The prosecutor might not even be able to make judgement calls because various alcohol laws mandate what they can or cannot do. AND, because most schools have implemented "zero tolerance" rules for alcohol and drugs, all of us would be suspended and/or expelled--whether valedictorian level or barely passing. The alcohol examples tend to be the most extreme but those extreme laws are just the tip of the iceberg. It's the world the Baby Boomers have created for our kids. What will we, GenX, do as we start to take the reigns in the next decade? Well, that's what I'm wondering, but I want everyone to start wondering.
Let's start with examples of what we, our schools, are punishing kids for--not just teenagers, but even young children. There's plenty of clothing suspensions nowadays, but think about that for a second. When were GenX (if you were in high school in the 80s or 90s, you're GenX basically) kids suspended for inappropriate clothing? I got sent home once for my mini-skirt being a quarter of an inch shorter than my fingertip with my hand stretched down by my side. Sent home to change, not suspended. And think about what we wore: alcohol tee shirts, Malcolm X tee shirts, yellow/green/red anti-apartheid tee shirts, gothic pendulums, rebel flags, a fuzzy green Qbert looking thing flipping the finger, Friday the 13th tee shirts, cropped shirts, Dio and Black Sabbath "devil worshipping" t-shirts. We didn't get sent home usually unless it involved marijuana, was skin tight spandex club wear or didn't meet some specific measurement of length. Our kids are not just coming home to change; they're going to be suspended...over a t-shirt. Students in 2010 were advised they could no longer wear pink bracelets that had the word "boobies" that were sold locally for Breast Cancer Awareness or they would be suspended for a minimum of 3 days. Not that I don't disagree that some things are offensive or might even be disruptive, but in our need to make the whiners happy, we've started taking even the simplest version of free speech away from our kids. Clothing seems nominal though. Who cares? The suspension seems a little rough, but well, those are the rules. What will be the impact of those rules?
OK, so try these on for size then:
A kid that was being bullied was punished for drawing in his notebook anime cartoons of an angel punishing the bully. For drawings. I used to write short stories about people I liked and didn't like when I was in high school. At the time, I used their names--first names anyway. In one story, I wrote about the heroine pushing another girl off a cliff. Today, I'd be suspended or expelled and possibly looking at criminal charges for threats because I used the name of a girl I didn't like.
Several kids I know were punished for having Midol, aspirin, and energy pills on them with varying degrees from 3 day to 6 month suspensions. "Zero tolerance" means those kids too. I feel sorry for the school nurse because even for OTC drugs she had to have permission slips and maintain the bottles sent from home in her office. The school district finally saw fit to lift the total ban after enough parents complained. That is the trick though; enough of us have to express outrage or threaten legal action to get more reasonable rules.
In two different cases, in different states, two kids were punished for letting school officials know that they had mistakenly brought weapons on school property. In one case, a teenager was dropped off for a football game and realized he had a pocket knife on him. Since there were no metal detectors or pat downs, he could've simply not said anything and attended the football game. Instead he went to the security guard, turned over the knife and explained the mistake. He was suspended. In another case, a young man had a shotgun from hunting still in his truck. He realized his mistake and went to the office to let them know so he could either take it home or have a parent come get the weapon. He was expelled and arrested with criminal charges for being honest. The school wouldn't have even known if he had just hidden it under a seat until the end of the day and removed it when he got home.
A bully brought a knife to school and attacked, was bullying, another student with it. A third student, also bullied previously by the bully, stopped the argument The third student was suspended for even getting involved in any altercation.
Same bully scenario, minus the knife, only second student was a mentally challenged student being picked on. A third student intervened and was suspended for getting involved.
A third party student was punished for videotaping a school fight. The circumstances are unclear whether the kid was attempting to capitalize on the video, but from various accounts, it was helpful to the authorities and the school and district were more concerned about how it made staff look.
A public school had a professional abstinence speaker come in and speak. The video of the professional speaker shows that she threatened students in order to push abstinence (and she did this with school sanctioning--seriously). A student followed this by speaking out "against" abstinence, really more for reasonable and responsible sexuality and was suspended.
A student was given a writing assignment. She wrote about God. She was suspended not because it was inappropriate for the assignment but just because of the fact she chose to write about God.
A high school student was performing a legitimate, school science project that had some undesired results. She was suspended pending an expulsion and was arrested on several felony charges for "bomb making". My lab partner and I screwed up a chemistry lab in high school where smoke and crap bubbled out all over the place too. Fortunately for us, no one was worried that our screw up was illegal. And what school is punishing an assigned project?!?!
A homeless teenager was living in his car. It is unclear where the parents were, but the teenager was suspected (or accused by the school to cover this fiasco up) of being an illegal immigrant. The school suspended a student for purchasing food from the school cafeteria and giving it to the homeless teenager.
On a school bus, a teenager brandished a real gun and made threats. The school suspended the student that took the gun away from the kid who had the gun.
Kindergartners in several states have been suspended for making toy guns with paper or legos, playing cops and robbers using finger guns, and/or talking about playing cops and robbers or cowboys and indians. Can you even imagine being suspended as a kindergartner in the 70s or 80s??? Or as a kindergartner at all?!?!
Now, here's the even bigger shocker now that you've read all of those. These are all recent; most in the last year. YES, the last year. To be honest, I had expected when I committed to this idea that I'd come up with a dozen or so examples over the last ten years. Instead, after just an hour's worth of research, I had enough to fill my next 3 or 4 blogs with Draconian examples from the past year. I just didn't know what to say, so I included the ones above hoping that you now are thinking that we might have a serious problem. Think about those examples and think about what freedoms and trust we had as kids that are now gone. Do we really want to punish kids for things that we ourselves thought were harmless? Or for telling the truth? Do I get the "no weapons on school property"? Yes, I do. But in all honesty, I know several of the farm boys I went to school with had gun racks in their trucks and their guns were in plain sight in the parking lot and that didn't mean they were using them. Still, we are taking punishing kids to an extreme. There are several examples of pre-teen and teenagers being arrested for various pranks that we took for granted as kids. In the last couple of years, kids have been arrested for toilet papering yards, throwing water balloons, missing curfews and for acting as the designated driver for party-goers.
We've become grossly hypocritical in the whole "do as I say, not as I do". We didn't even have laws for curfews in most areas when we were kids and pranks were pranks. Toilet paper would deteriorate or could be cleaned. No one went to jail for it. Could they have arrested us for vandalism in the 80s and 90s? I suppose since the kids have been arrested under standing vandalism laws. But would an officer then do it? Would they be instructed to? No, I never heard of such lunacy until now. Instead of the officer spending a half an hour to an hour getting those kids to parents, he/she will spend three to five hours processing kids into juvenile detention. Does that make any sense? Then we wonder why we can't afford police or have enough available for real crimes? We've started punishing kids for "group failures" also. Many teachers have been taking group grades and picking the groups putting less than stellar students with more talented students. This increases the overall GPA, but denies those students that are talented appropriate grades. Since college entrance is solely based on the individual student's grades, this should be totally inappropriate. Mainstreaming, as discussed previously, has resulted in mentally challenged students adversely affecting other students' classes, but more importantly, schools have started making severer punishments for them and other students in order to deal with "uncontrolled" behavior. The example I gave in a previous blog of the student beating himself against a wall has some school districts taking those children in an attempt to adjust their behavior and/or protect other students and placing them in small rooms by themselves for hours a day. Often these mentally challenged students have urinated on themselves or acted out even more aggressively. These methods of dealing with mainstreaming are grossly unfair to the mentally challenged students, but it also means that administrators and teachers have less patience with their regular students. In fact, an A student was punished by being isolated for some in class indiscretion by being isolated for several hours, or we would not even know that the mentally handicapped students were being punished that way since they often lack the communication skills to explain what's happening. Those Draconian approaches being easier and easier to implement each time. Why have we gotten so extreme as to how we handle "normal" children and teenager behaviors?
Some schools have begun taking Draconian to a whole new level. In 2010, a whistle blowing teacher was terminated for identifying that her school district was spying on kids via school issued laptops' webcams. Think about that. Do you want someone from your kids' school watching your kid and what's going on in the background, perhaps activating the mic and listening in on your discussions with your child? You may think, 'I've got nothing to hide', but if your kid isn't home, left the computer on, you just got out of the shower and run across the house to get a towel out of the dryer...Do you want a school administrator to have access then? Do you want a school administrator listening in to the discussion you and your child have about a school crush? About Grandma's health? About your daughter's period? Watching your son or daughter undressing before bed? You've got nothing to hide, but it doesn't mean that everything in your child's life, or yours for that matter, is their business. Think about that for a second, because all schools now have punishments in place for kids' behaviors off campus and outside of school hours. Kids have been suspended and/or expelled for shoplifting, for drinking alcohol at a weekend party, and other transgressions that in the 80s and 90s were none of their business. We talk about "Leave No Child Behind", yet we seem to be finding ways to eliminate and weed out any kid that is not in complete compliance with rules that we ourselves didn't live with.
Since the main issue in this girl's case is alcohol use, let's focus there for a second. Alcohol is a "Zero Tolerance" in almost every single school district across this country. Yet, we all know it's going on still and with good kids--this good student was just punished for picking up her drunk friend, for cripe's sake. It's the "Zero Tolerance" policies that dictate this punishment. Now, I'm going to offend some people, I'm sure, but I want you to think about some things and there's no getting around offending some people in the process. First, think about the teen movies of the ages. The 80s, there was "The Breakfast Club" and they talk about getting "hammered" (drunk) at a party the upcoming weekend and smoke pot on screen. In the 90s, there was "Varsity Blues", "The 10 Things I Hate About You", "Clueless". In the last 10 years, "Mean Girls", "John Tucker Must Die", The "American Pie" Series. All of these have teenagers partying no different than every generation before them. No different than our generation, no different than the Baby Boomers, no different than the Silent Generation. Yet, we've made it impossible for these kids to learn to drink responsibly; we've made it where they have to learn for themselves and from each other. While I agree with not allowing them into bars until they're 21, I have issue with allowing them to vote, allowing them to join the military and die for this country and not legally allowing them a beer. I have a huge issue with us having laws that will punish parents for serving their own teenagers in their own home, or even at a restaurant over dinner. We want kids to learn to "drink responsibly" yet we don't want anyone to teach them to drink responsibly. In fact, we don't even want adults to drink responsibly. Our laws now state anyone over 0.08 BAC is legally impaired and will be charged. That's not even a beer an hour for the average female. For the average adult female, that is a beer or glass of wine every hour and an half. While MADD had a very valid point in the 1980s, they have continued to push for more and more Draconian laws on the adults in this country. So what else would we expect from the high schools on the teenage kids? A teenager can be punished for not drinking, but just for being in attendance--even briefly--at a party where alcohol was present. They can be suspended or expelled, regardless of circumstances. Why should this be such a shock? In the early 90s, MADD drunk (excuse the pun) with power had achieved it's goals of punishing habitual drunk drivers and getting states to putting at least 0.15 BAC limits in place. They began trying to end run around the 5th Amendment because they thought too many people were "getting off" by refusing to take BAC tests. So they began to push for legislation where there would be mandatory punishments on drivers' licenses regardless of the legal system. MADD has pushed for other laws too like ones that make it illegal for you to serve your own teenagers in a restaurant, make it illegal to purchase it for kids, and even that make it illegal for you to serve your own kids in your own house. MADD wants "Zero Tolerance" for adults and has been very successful. (In fact, they are pushing now for 0.04 BAC.) So, why would we expect the schools to behave any differently than what we as a society have already begun to accept as appropriate? If your kid was at the party, drinking or not, they should be expelled. But, the truth is, and no one wants to say it, high school kids are still going to drink. The data that says they don't is skewed because kids are not going to answer those surveys at school honestly. We wouldn't back when I was in school and there were no Draconian rules in place where we'd be expelled. We sure can't expect them to be honest in this day and age. Many are beginning to question the effectiveness of "Zero Tolerance" and I really want all of you to start thinking about it also. What is it's impact on our kids? On our society as a whole?
The biggest problem is that we are hypocrites and the laws and rules we are putting in place are actually rules and laws that we ourselves are unwilling to abide by. I know police officers that drink more than BAC allowed level when they are out. Well, duh, look at the damn level now. Even our law enforcement can't keep to that standard, because even some guys can't if they go and have a single drink. But we're complacent as long as it doesn't directly affect us at that moment. So what if the high school policy book says they will suspend or expel our kids for this or that...my kid's not going to get suspended or expelled. He or she is a good kid. Sadly, even good kids can be caught by these rules and like the adult alcohol laws, the teachers and administrators have to abide by the "Zero Tolerance" rules. Yes, in that case, you're "good kid" who's worse transgression is that they don't keep their room clean can be nailed for picking up a drunk friend after they get off work because they wanted to make sure that their friend got home safe. The school asked her about this, of course, and like a couple of the earlier examples, she was honest about taking a drunk friend home. If only she had lied. The biggest problem with Draconian, cut and dry, black and white laws that are very stringent, is that it forces even honest people to lie. Don't believe me? Think about prohibition in the 1920s. Even churches were breaking the law to have wine for communion and other religious ceremonies!!! Like I stated a little bit ago, alcohol is the best example, not just because it's where this girl's suspension started, but because we as a society have a history that we can look back on and correlate what is happening now to then. Everyone, even law enforcement, became criminals when it came to alcohol in the 1920s (remember having it and even drinking it was a crime). There are other Draconian rules out there that we argue and debate on occasion even now, but none of them have such a great correlation. The end game to severe and harsh laws is lying. We're hypocrites, teaching our kids it might be better to lie, join the "dark side" than face Draconian punishments.
That's a pretty big accusation, I know. We're teaching kids to lie because we don't want them drinking alcohol and don't want them having weapons at school--but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that we are tightening our grasp so drastically, when we already know that will not work, and forcing our society, teaching our kids, that it is better to lie than to tell the truth because the consequences can ruin them. In this young lady's case, she is captain of volleyball team, well, was. No university wants to offer a scholarship to a student that was suspended, let alone expelled. This one decision, that we all will agree was the right decision, is now possibly the end of her college hopes and dreams too. Seriously, think about that too. If you were her parents, you'd be making a scene out of it too. Yet, if her and her friends lied, who would've been the wiser. Yes, I would argue that we are teaching an entire generation to lie, because while rules and laws have to be in place to uphold order, we don't have to make them completely improbable of being followed, let alone impossible, forcing anyone and everyone to lie when they are confronted with it.
Earlier, I stated this will be GenX's problem to resolve. It will be. The Baby Boomers have had the Presidency for almost 20 years now. In that time, we've seen society re-polarize like it was during the 1960s. It's a whole different blog discussing the bi-polar Baby Boomer generation, but think about some of them that you know--look at the fiasco in Washington right now. Now consider how when we are complacent, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. I mentioned that MADD has probably already gone too far and is still pushing for more Draconian rules. (They are not the only ones, but again, the best fitting example in this girl's case.) We have rolled those rules out to our kids and into our school systems, and they are NOT working. I remember when someone told me about the new possible "Zero Tolerance" policies. My boys were in elementary school, so it didn't affect me and I didn't give it a second thought. I'm betting neither have you. I'm betting neither did the parents of this young woman, but we all know that they are thinking about it now. The purpose of this blog is simple: Are you thinking about it now? Are you worried now that it might be your child, his/her college dreams, your hopes and aspirations for your children, destroyed because of a Draconian rule that might deteriorate their chances or even destroy it?
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