So, being a curious eight year old can get you kick out of school in Colorado. It seems that school principals just can't wait to suspend students, in other words, get them out of the classroom. The first report below is a great example of this mentality. Is there a quota for suspensions? We know of a middle school student who was suspended because he didn't remove his cap fast enough at the behest of an over-controlling principal.
I would be accused of being too permissive, but I would challenge the armchair disciplinarians out there to find out the facts about our school system instead of just reactively demanding more punishment for our children. Here is a truism: they cannot learn if they aren't even in the school
Two other news reports here that show how so-called 'zero tolerance' and high stakes testing are destroying our children and our schools.
We have observed many times that young children in school are being criminalized for childish behavior by mean and risk-averse administrators. The second article shows that very clearly. Projecting adult fears onto little kids and then punishing them for kid-like antics is revolting.
Of course, the other great hypocrisy of administrators and parents is that they embrace the popular culture where lewd images, violence and war, rampant materialism and indulgence are great consumer virtues -- then the try and excoriate students when they bring the accompanying behaviors into the school building. So, hundreds or thousands of adults in a town or city may make an honest living working for a brewery or a beer distributor or selling alcoholic beverages in restaurants, but if a kid wears a charitable event tee-shirt with a Budweiser logo on the back, the child is in big trouble.
We have one suggestion -- get the police out of the schools. What in the world is happening that the first recourse to any problem is calling the police on kids in school?
The third article is an illustration of what 'No Child Left Behind' is doing to the schools. In this case the incident was reported ... we know that very similar antics from administrators goes on all the time because of the pressure of 'accountability' testing. It would have been poetic justice the principal in this circumstance got what a student would have gotten for uttering words like that -- an arrest in the building, handcuffed, suspension and probably expulsion from the school system.
Link: Sharpie Boy, 8, Suspended | Rocky Mountain News
In hindsight, the Harris Park Elementary School principal might've toned down the three-day suspension originally given to an 8-year-old sniffing the fumes from a Sharpie marker.
"Would he have made the same decision again?" asked Adams School District 50 spokeswoman Deb Haviland. "He might rethink it and instead use it as a teachable moment."
Ethan Harris saw the suspension for the incident last week dropped from three days to one day. Principal Chris Benisch said the suspension was leveled because the boy repeatedly kept sniffing the clothing upon which he'd stained with the black marker.
Link: For Little Children, Grown-Up Labels As Sexual Harassers | Washington Post
In his seven years, Randy Castro has been an aspiring soccer player, an accomplished Lego architect and a Royal Ranger at his Pentecostal church. He also, according to his elementary school record, sexually harassed a first-grade classmate.
During recess at his Woodbridge school one day in November, when he was 6, he said, he smacked the classmate's bottom. The girl told the teacher. The teacher took Randy to the principal, who told him such behavior was inappropriate. School officials wrote an incident report calling it "Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive," which will remain on his student record permanently.
Then, as Randy sat in the principal's office, they called the police.
"I thought they were going to take me to prison," Randy said recently. "I was scared."
Prince William County school officials would not comment on Randy's case, citing student confidentiality. They said the call to police was the result of a misunderstanding.
Randy is only one of many children to be dealt with harshly as schools across the country grapple with enforcing new zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies and the fear of litigation.
The Virginia Department of Education reported that 255 elementary students were suspended last year for offensive sexual touching, or "improper physical contact against a student." In Maryland, 166 elementary school children were suspended last year for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, 16 kindergartners and 22 first-graders, according to the State Department of Education. Statistics for the District were not available.
In 2006, a kindergartner in Hagerstown, Md., was accused of sexual harassment after pinching a female classmate's buttocks. A 4-year-old in Texas was given an in-school suspension after a teacher's aide accused him of sexual harassment for pressing his face into her breasts when he hugged her.
Ted Feinberg, assistant director of the National Association of School Psychologists in Bethesda, said he had never come across a case of sexual harassment in elementary school in his three decades in the schools. To label somebody a sexual harasser at 6 "doesn't make sense to me," he said. "Kids can be exploratory in behavior, they can mimic what they see on TV."
Randy sat on the lower bunk in his bedroom recently and explained what happened Nov. 26 on the playground at Potomac View Elementary School. Katherine DeLeon, a classmate who regularly came over to play, was kneeling on a bench, talking to friends. He said he saw another boy race over to the girl, whack her on the bottom and run away, giggling and pretending he hadn't done it. He did it twice more, Randy said.
Randy said he thought it looked like fun, so he joined in, hitting her and running away twice. "Every time he hit her, she laughed," Randy said. "When I hit her, she told the teacher."
Katherine's mother, Margarita DeLeon, who was contacted by school officials shortly after the incident, said that her daughter didn't like being hit but that she quickly forgot about it. "We didn't pay attention to it, because we know it's just children playing around," she said. "He didn't mean anything by it. I'm upset with the school."
Claudia Castro, a preschool teacher in Alexandria, said she was shocked when officials at Randy's school called to say that he was in trouble and that they were calling the police. She later met with the principal and assistant principal. "I told them that what he did was not appropriate. And I have talked to him about it. What I don't understand is how you can make a police report on a 6-year-old. But the principal told me that they were making reports to the police every single day."
The school's incident report, provided to The Washington Post by Randy's family, says the "police were contacted" after the playground episode. Police arrived after dismissal, when Randy had already gone home. Castro said she shared the story with The Post in the hope of changing school policy.
Days before the incident, at a routine meeting with district officials, principals had been reminded to report threats and assaults to the police. "There was some confusion as to what level of threat and assault we were talking about," said Ken Blackstone, a school system spokesman.
Some officials and students said Potomac View administrators made an announcement that a new district policy required them to inform the police of student misbehavior. But Blackstone said there was no new policy. After the meeting, he said, principals were confused about when to call police. "As a result, there were too many calls that may not have been necessary because of people wanting to comply with the initial request."
"Some of the calls," Prince William police spokeswoman Ericka Hernandez said, "were about incidents the police did not have to be involved in."
Blackstone pointed to the school district's code of behavior, which states that police may be called for "offenses involving weapons, alcohol/drugs, intentional injury, and other serious violations."
Two school board members declined to comment on the case, and Blackstone would not make the Potomac View principal available for comment.
Mary Kay Sommers, president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, said suspensions and calls to the police in such cases are overkill. The correct response, she said, would be to explore whether the behavior is linked to abuse and to teach students about respecting peers and what constitutes "good touch" or "bad touch."
"There's no way these children understand what's going on. But it's been taken out of our hands. That's the difficult moral dilemma that we face," Sommers said. She blamed two Supreme Court decisions from the 1990s that enable suits against school districts for failing to stop sexual harassment as well as zero-tolerance policies aimed at middle and high school students that are applied to students as young as 5.
"We need to make sure that we follow the letter of the law, so being reasonable sometimes gets lost," she said.
But Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, said educators do have some leeway: "Zero tolerance does not mean zero good judgment."
Since November, Randy has been calling himself a "bad boy," his mother said.
Castro said school officials rejected her appeal to remove the sexual harassment incident from Randy's permanent file. And now she worries that they have branded him a troublemaker.
She points to an incident in January when Randy was suspended for three days for verbal "harassment" and inappropriate behavior. According to the principal's incident report, as Randy walked home from school, he told two girls to kiss and asked another student, "Are you gay?" and "Why are you wearing girl's boots?"
Randy and his siblings, who were walking with him that day, dispute the account. They said he teased an older boy and girl about kissing. He said if the boy didn't kiss the girl, it meant he was gay. Randy said he learned the word on TV.
School officials, citing confidentiality, declined to comment on the incident.
Castro agreed that Randy's behavior was inappropriate but worried that he is being too severely scrutinized because of the spanking incident. "My feeling is that they are picking on him," she said.
Castro said she met again with school officials and asked why, if they were concerned about Randy, he wasn't in counseling. "The counselor told me he didn't need it," she said.
Link: New Braunfels Teachers: Principal Said He'd Kill Them | Houston Chronicle
A middle school principal threatened to kill a group of science teachers if their students did not improve their standardized test scores, according to a complaint filed with the New Braunfels Police Department.
Anita White, who taught at New Braunfels Middle School for 18 years before being transferred this month to the district's Learning Center, said Principal John Burks made the threat in a Jan. 21 meeting with eighth-grade science teachers.
She said Burks was angry that scores on benchmark tests were not better, and the scores on the upcoming Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests must show improvement.
"He said if the TAKS scores were not as expected he would kill the teachers," White said. "He said 'I will kill you all and kill myself.' He finished the meeting that way and we were in shock. Obviously, we talked about it among ourselves. He just threatened our lives. After he threatened to kill us, he said, 'You don't know how ruthless I can be.'
"We walked out of the meeting just totally dumbfounded because it was not a joke," White said.
New Braunfels police spokesman Mike Penshorn said the incident was filed as a verbal assault, but is being investigated as a terroristic threat.
Burks did not return a call seeking comment. Other teachers White said were at the meeting also did not return calls.
Jacob Gonzales, an eighth-grade science teacher at the school who was not at the meeting, said another teacher, besides White, mentioned it, telling Gonzales "it was not spoken in a joking manner and it kind of alarmed him and gave him an uneasy feeling."
New Braunfels School District spokeswoman Stephanie Ferguson said Burks told her it did not happen. She spoke to him after learning of the allegation from reporters.
"I did not talk to the other teachers. Other than that, it is a personnel matter and I can't talk about it. We have not seen a police report."
White said she decided to file the police report after one of the teachers spoke to a school board member about the incident, without result. She said she also plans to file a grievance with the school board.
Before she filed the complaint on Saturday, White said, Burks told her she was being transferred to the Learning Center, which houses the district's disciplinary school, because of the test scores. She said her classes' standardized test scores were consistently the best in the grade.
Ferguson later released a three-sentence statement that noted White filed the complaint after being reassigned. The statement quoted Burks as saying, "All personnel decisions are made with the best interests of students in mind."
Many teachers complain about the importance placed on TAKS scores, saying a single, standardized test often does not measure how well their students are learning.
"It sounds like a case of TAKS tyranny taken to the extreme," said Joe Bean a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, who said teachers and administrators are often punished for disappointing test performance.
"Once a principal gets a reputation as not able to get the scores that are required, that principal is virtually unemployable," he said.
Bean said the TAKS provides only a snapshot of how students performed on that day and that students of some outstanding teachers and schools sometimes do not score well for a variety of reasons.
