Letters to the Editor
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Worst Persons... In The Wooooorld!
If these school officials don't make Keith Olbermann's WPITW, I will be very surprised.
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A 'second offender' because she gave two hugs?
Clearly these folks have no idea what 'second offender' means. The rule obviously suggests it means you already got a warning and you are ignoring the rule for a second time.
Stop her before she hugs again! Oh! My! God!
There are definite limits to the level of physical affection that is appropriate in public. Rules like this do ZERO to help students learn what these limits are. At my kids' school, the girls hold hands and hug each other constantly. It's called friendship, and it's encouraged. We pay a lot of money for private school just so our kids can be treated as human beings.
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dumb policy for half-interested adults
Zero-tolerance policies in schools are as dumb as you can get. I'm sick of grandstanding politicians (school boards included) making laws to appease bitter, barely interested adults. This leads to cases like this, or 7 year olds getting suspended for sexual-harassment. This way adults don't actually have to think when (bad?) events transpire, they just punish!
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I read the original article on this.
It's about PDA (public displays of affection), and the policy is not out of line. Sometimes even hugs can be, well, over-sexualized and disruptive. Here is the MSNBC article on the story
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21661718/
Don't blame school officials for enforcing it. If they do not enforce the policy on everyone, the school gets sued, and kids lose funds for their education. The school board passed it. If you don't like it, jump them.
Why do people ignore the politicians who pass stuff, and blame the people who are just doing their jobs?
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Political Correctness
gone to the extreme. This is just plain STUPID. Why is it everyone has to be PC ANYWAY? Are we SO afraid of what someone will say or do?
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Stuff it, Domini
Don't blame school officials for enforcing it.
Yeah, no matter how idiotic or immoral it was. The eternal refrain of moral cowards: we were just following orders.
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From the original article:
'District Superintendent Sam McGowen said that he thinks the penalty is fair and that administrators in the school east of St. Louis were following policy in the student handbook.
It states: “Displays of affection should not occur on the school campus at any time. It is in poor taste, reflects poor judgment, and brings discredit to the school and to the persons involved.”'
My Reason #487 to support unschooling....
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Not out of line???
Domini, the policy forbids "any display of affection at any time." That IS out of line.
Also, the school officials are not enforcing the policy as written. You are supposed to get a warning upon the first "offense" and get a detention for the second one. She didn't get a warning. Both hugs happened at nearly the same time! How can the second hug be a second "offense"? If she didn't get a warning after the first hug, it's not fair to give her detention. She should get a warning. Also, if the second hug is the purported second offense, she should only get a detention for that one. She got two detentions, "one for each hug."
The school board passed a stupid, totally un-nuanced rule, and the principal enforced it with the hamhandedness of an authoritarian control freak.
Even in the "real," adult world, enforcement of laws and punishments are subject to the discretion of judges and juries. Kids in schools get the benefit of no such discretion because it's supposed to be more "fair" that way. But it's less fair.
Schools are supposed to be safe, nurturing places for kids to learn. Not prisons. Jesus Christ.
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The only Zero Tolerance I approve of...
..is zero tolerance for zero tolerance programs. Like mandatory minimum sentencing, ZT programs are the height of intellectual and moral laziness. Which is why the results they produce are ludicrous – when they’re not unjust and/or tragic.
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I know I'll get jumped on for this, but...
I actually think we could use a lot more hugging in this country. One of the reasons we have such hostility is that we are so increasingly disconnected from one another. Hugging breeds affection and closeness. We already have enough stand-offish, poorly adjusted people in this country.
Maybe rather than banning hugs, we should make them mandatory.
And I frankly think most people who are so upset by PDAs are of the aforementioned stand-offish, poorly adjusted type. The offense people take is all based on the cultural Christian-Puritan shaming system. I'm not so sure we should be catering so strongly to the maladjusted.
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely
That's really all it is. The child has been given a good lesson of what it's like to live in a totalitarian environment and be judged by a kangaroo court. It'll probably stick better than any social-science lesson ever could.
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It was clear an obvious harassment. I think the girl should be kicked out of school
and forced to attend diversity training, anger management, and sexual harassment training.
Once these classes are completed and she writes an essay describing how her sexual harassment has victimized all of the students at the school, and once she has apologized in front of her entire class for her behavior, then perhaps we can reconsider the decision to kick her out of school.
I think it's also necessary that this entire horrible incident be written on her permanent transcript.
Thank g-d for zero tolerance pogroms and thank g-d for the complete lack of humor displayed by bureaucrats and the feminists that created these pogroms.
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HA HA HA
you libs ushered this PC bull into the world.
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"Why do people ignore the politicians who pass stuff, and blame the people who are just doing their jobs?"
In this case, both are at fault, as I said above.
But, seriously. Do you think there should be NO display of affection allowed at school at ALL? That doesn't teach kids to be responsible. It is just crowd control, like so much of our broken school system.
I'm with you, firefly. I wish homeschooling were for me - but it's definitely not (which is why our kids are in private school - something I NEVER though I would do).
But not everyone has the privilege of educational choices. We need a functional public school system in this country, and it is so dysfunctional I don't even know where to start. But I do know that buiilding those little Bob Evans storefronts on the DOE wasn't it.