<p>And so if they get a DWI but nothing has happened with school, then their transcript looks just fine???</p>
<p>The world is often an “unfair place”. Is your concern that there be “equal” consequences, or stronger consequences for a DWI, or something else?</p>
<p>Anyway, I doubt that any of “the top” colleges are willing to entertain IDad’s hypothesis.</p>
<p>Yes, that’s right, MomofWildChild. That is the way life works. </p>
<p>The same situation occurs for other problems that occurred outside of the high school. For instance, a student who was convicted of shoplifting would not have that mentioned on their transcript. A student who was suspended from school for cheating would have that mentioned on their transcript.</p>
<p>Most college applications do ask, however, about whether a student has been convicted of a crime. That’s where the DWI or shoplifting conviction should be mentioned by the student. Failure to do that could result in the recission of the student’s admission or even their college degree. Of course, mentioning a shoplifting conviction or a DWI could lead to a student’s being rejected from college. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, when it comes to DWIs and even speeding tickets, some employers now are doing background checks and are refusing to hire people who have had such problems. This happened to a college student whom my husband had recommended for a summer internship.</p>
<p>The company did a background check and learned that the student had had a speeding ticket. At that point, the company withdrew its internship offer, saying that was related to some policy of the company’s insurance. </p>
<p>My best guess is that the company’s insurance wanted to avoid hiring risk takers for fear that such employees would have higher medical and other problems. Having received a speeding ticket may put a person in the category of being a risk taker.</p>
<p>"Many if not most people also will drive, vote, marry, and even watch X rated movies once they are adults. That doesn’t mean, however, that most adults would enable or encourage teens and children to do those things that are illegal for underaged people.</p>
<p>If people don’t like the laws preventing underaged drinking, what they should do is work to change the laws, not encourage or enable teens to break the laws."</p>
<p>True, but don’t we as parents hope to model good driving, active participation in our civic responsibility to vote, and the care and importance of a good relationship with our spouse? (I don’t watch x-rated films, with or without my kids!;)) That was my point about modelling responsible behavior. I’m not ‘encouraging’ anyone to break any laws, nor am I enabling them. I think it’s crystal clear that the current way of doing things, by just stating that it’s forbidden and illegal, isn’t working, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And as far as working to change the laws, I thankfully (for many reasons) now live in Canada where the laws are much more reasonable, and where this type of problem does not exist in the prevalant way it does on U.S. campuses. There must be a reason for that.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone here condones, or approves of, parents who choose to serve alcoholic beverages to their children’s friends. I, personally, have never known anyone who has done this, so it hasn’t been an issue in any of my Ds’ lives. I also don’t think any of us think that kids should be drinking at 13 or 15, as is mentioned in the research quoted. The issue of alcohol suspensions being noted on school reports in the college application process is an interesting one. How many public high schools are going to have occasion to suspend kids for this? Other than kids drinking on school property or on a school trip, how would the school even know about their students’ drinking habits? This may be an issue for private schools but I think it’s a much smaller issue for public h/s guidance counsellors to be reporting such suspensions. No school that any of my Ds attended would have any responsibility for what students do on their own time and off school property.</p>
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<p>Mini:</p>
<p>I am under no illusion that denying admission to drunks would end all campus drunkenness. Nor, do I think that colleges could ever identify all of the incoming drunks. However, we do know two facts:</p>
<p>a) Drunks begat drunks on college campuses. The more drunks you have, the more likely additional students will become drunks. This “critical mass” issue is clear from Weschler’s data.</p>
<p>b) High school binge drinkers are vastly more likely to become frequent binge drinkers (“drunks”) in college than high school non-binge drinkers. This is one of the most stunning correlations in all of Weschler’s data. 74% of high school binge drinkers are binge drinkers in college versus just 31% of high-school non-binge drinkers. More stunning: 47% of high school binge drinkers are frequent binge drinkers in college versus just 12% of the high school non-binge drinkers.</p>
<p>Thus, it seems to me that any gains a college makes in reducing the enrollment of high school binge drinkers will have a multiplier effect in reducing campus drunkenness. Furthermore, I suspect that it is much easier to reduce the number of high school drunks on campus than it is to get high school drunks to stop being drunks at college.</p>
<p>I don’t really think that it is the drinking policies at Smith (for example) that result in lower binge drinking rates. Rather, I think that Smith simply enrolls fewer high school binge drinkers and, by having fewer drunks on campus to start with, the resulting campus culture is less conducive and less socially enabling to drunkeness.</p>
<p>Obviously, the admissions approach to curtailing drunkeness is problematic for less selective universities. But, at colleges and universities that have 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 or 20 qualified candidates for each seat in the freshman class, it seems fairly obvious that giving a preference to non-high school drunks would be a sensible strategy. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, these colleges do just the opposite; they give an admissions advantage to populations with high percentages of high school drunks. For example, I doubt we really need Weschler to estimate the binge drinking rate among the varsity hockey tips at College #1 (essentially all of whom came from NE boarding schools where they compiled academic transcripts below average for admission to College #1)? And, yet, the President of College #1 recently expressed (feigned?) total surprise when the data from his alcohol study showed that certain athletic teams were a center of drunkenness on campus.</p>
<p>I have a naive question, to which I probably know the answer. Where are high school students getting the alcohol? It must be from either parents or older siblings, possibly without their knowledge. Access to alcohol for HS kids seems like a simple problem to solve – either don’t keep it in the house, or make sure they can’t get to it. It is, after all, illegal to supply minors with alcohol, and I’m happy when I hear about adults being prosecuted for supplying alcohol to underage kids.</p>
<p>For college students, I’m sure they get it from upperclass students. I still don’t understand why there is such tolerance for frat house or dorm parties where alcohol is available. Why aren’t there consequences for those who bring it in? I think part of the problem is that we tolerate alcohol in a way that we don’t tolerate other drugs.</p>
<p>“How many public high schools are going to have occasion to suspend kids for this?”</p>
<p>In the US, a lot would be able to do this. This is because of the students who sneak booze in to dances and drink on high school grounds during lunch and after school.The same also occurs for drugs.</p>
<p>Clearly, all students do not do these things. Many students, however, do, and need to be held fully accountable. When it comes to being illegally in possession of booze on school grounds, this should also result in the police’s being called in just as occurs when students are found in possession of drugs.</p>
<p>sjmom, I think colleges tolerate parties with alcohol because frankly, that’s part of the attractiveness of some colleges, and that’s how they keep kids entertained. I wouldn’t be surprised if some colleges are silently accepting of this behavior because it attracts kids to their schools and somehow makes their school more alluring.</p>
<p>Northstarmom, I still don’t think that it would be “a lot” of high schools that would have this knowledge. I’ve lived many years in both countries and, perhaps it depends on the state or area you live, but none of our high schools would have had any of that knowledge. Bringing alcohol and/or drugs into school dances, or onto school property, just was not a problem where we were (in three different states).</p>
<p>No matter how hard-line the approach to curbing, controlling, busting underage drinking, we are still not getting at the root causes… I suspect, based on the heavy drinking demographics, they may have a lot to do with affluenza, poor ‘EQ,’ lack of secure selfhood.</p>
<p>I don’t know if I was the only one who noticed Lucifer’s post about having a tv in his room since he was “months” old? Are we raising a generation of kids who don’t know how to be alone with their own thoughts and feelings, and thus are impelled to fill every nook and cranny of mental space with music, texting, RPGs, and getting high? </p>
<p>Don’t flame me for the slam on electronics-- I am just pointing out that as a kid I had a lot more downtime and empty space to drift along in than most kids do today. </p>
<p>Also, the EQ theory would fit the fact that more males binge drink; girls get more societal training and support for being in touch with feelings, expressing feelings.</p>
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<p>Just choose your state and send $130 (with the official hologram option):</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.theidshop.com/fake_id.html[/url]”>http://www.theidshop.com/fake_id.html</a></p>
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<p>Not only do high school and middle school students get alcohol from their homes, both with and without their parents’ knowledge, they also hang out outside of grocery stores and pay an adult to buy them booze. They fill emptied water bottles with vodka which is favored because of its colorless, odorless properties, and bring these bottles to dances and parties and school.</p>
<p>Alwaysamom,
How do you know that the schools that your kids attended had no problems with people bringing booze/drugs into school?</p>
<p>The main reason that I heard about these problems at my kids’ schools was that I was prez of the parent organization and spent a lot of time with the schools’ top administrators. Most parents didn’t realize that there were problems with kids smoking dope in the bathrooms and in the woods around the school. They also didn’t realize that the school instituted rather draconian security procedures during the rare dances in order to try to prevent booze and drugs from being brought in.</p>
<p>In another part of the country, I also did a lot of substance abuse prevention work in high schools of all kinds, ranging from low income/inner city ones to wealthy suburban ones. All had problems with substance abuse.</p>
<p>In my own town, I’ve also observed our local Teen Court, and have seen students from all parts of the city who plead guilty to having booze on their high school campuses.</p>
<p>Without this kind of inside perspective, however, I’d have no clue about the prevalence of drugs/alcohol in high schools. My older son was a loner in high school, hung around the house a lot and worked a job. By his own choice, he never went to parties or school events, and in general, he refused to talk about school.</p>
<p>Younger son has lots of friends and does go to some parties and hosts parties. These are places that are chaperoned (I know the parents) and where the kids are doing things like watching horror films and playing video games. </p>
<p>The only reason that I heard that someone (not in his group) had smuggled booze into a school dance is that one of his friends mentioned it to me. This particular son – who always emphasizes the sunny side of things – told me about things like the good clean fun aspects of the dance. I suppose that if I had asked if anyone there had been drinking/drugging, he would have told me, but that’s not something I thought to ask. </p>
<p>When I went to my upper middle class, highly rated public high school in a conservative community more than 30 years ago, it was only after graduation that I learned that throughout the school year, pot had been growing in a planter that was right by the front door. That was my introduction to learning that just because I am not aware of people’s drug/alcohol use on school grounds doesn’t mean it isn’t happpening.</p>
<p>I don’t know about kids using drugs at school, although it is an urban school- not like my suburban high school that had terraced gardens where you couldn’t be seen from windows, but I do know that they do random breathalyzer checks in line at dances .
When I was in high school though, it was easier to get pot than alcohol- although I had such a lifestyle that if I didn’t have two keg parties to go to each weekend, my social life was dead
The wealthy suburbs didn’t have kegs, they had hard liquor parties.</p>
<p>Info on drinking in high schools:
"Sobriety Tests Are Becoming Part of the School Day</p>
<p>By PATRICK O’GILFOIL HEALY
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. - For years, schools across the country have deployed breath analyzers at proms, pep rallies and other after-school events to catch students who arrived drunk or smuggled in alcohol.</p>
<p>After some resistance and fevered debate, student advocates and even lawyers gradually came to accept that schools were within their rights to use every means to ensure that students were not toting six-packs and liquor bottles to after-school, night and weekend events.</p>
<p>Quietly though, a few districts around the country, from Indiana to Connecticut to Long Island, have begun to integrate breath-testing devices into the regular school day, a move that adds a new wrinkle to the ongoing struggle between students’ privacy rights and a school’s duty to limit drug and alcohol abuse.</p>
<p>Schools say they need to ensure that no students are drinking in class…Manufacturers of breath analyzers say they have sold their devices to thousands of schools across the country, but it is impossible to say how many districts have started using breath-alcohol tests during the school day…"</p>
<p>AlwaysAMom, I picked up on this comment you wrote:
“Other than kids drinking on school property or on a school trip, how would the school even know about their students’ drinking habits? This may be an issue for private schools but I think it’s a much smaller issue for public h/s guidance counsellors to be reporting such suspensions. No school that any of my Ds attended would have any responsibility for what students do on their own time and off school property.”</p>
<p>Maybe it was different if your kids attended private school but the policy at our high school is VERY different. Our substance abuse policy goes BEYOND the usual “on school property or school sponsored activity away from the premises.” Any student who represents the school because he/she is involved in co-curricular activites, cannot use or possess these substances at any time, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, as long as they are an active member of any EC activity. I happen to not agree with this policy. I don’t think schools should be the ones policing what the kids are doing under their parents’ supervision (not on school grounds or not in EC actvities). The way it is now in our district, if it is found out that a student attended a party and drank on Sat. night, they are in trouble with SCHOOL whereas I feel they should be in trouble but with police and their parents, not the school. I think the school’s jurisdiction should be either on their property or in their school sponsored activities. Here a student drinking in their own home, if found out, would face the entire list of consequences from the school on top of any with the parents or police.</p>
<p>I mentioned in another post how two years ago, there was an after prom party at the house of two of the graduates and one of their parents is on the school board. The parents opted to not be home (speculation that has a basis is that the parents purposely were not home so that the kids could have this party which in THEIR view was a safer place to be post prom). In my view, it was the DUMBEST decision a parent could ever make and I don’t condone it AT ALL. My D opted to not attend plus we have a rule that parents had to be home (though, um, in this case, not sure that would have made a difference!). Anyway, sure enough, lots of drinking occurred. In fact, some got unruly and there was damage to other vehicles parked on that rural road that night attributed to the party goers. A senior got intoxicated and passed out and his buddies had the wisdom to drive him 25 miles to the ER where he had alcohol poisoning but survived. He was a star athlete, tops in the state. The state championship meet was coming up. This boy violated the school policy because he had drank (there is a 24/7 policy for anyone in ECs) and so according to the rules/consequences, he was to be suspended from EC activities for 21 days and could not compete in events (on top of all the other consequences in the school policy). Well, his parents fought this to the state board. It was big news. I could not understand that a parent was basically siding with the kid! And rules are rules. They were claiming it could not be proven that he had drank…um, the kid went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, everyone KNOWS this. They got some lawyer to fight it and a judge to allow him to compete, if I recall. Later on, our school won the championship, due, in part, to this kid’s involvement. Later, the championship was contested and the trophy taken away from the school or else, I’m fuzzy on this now, our school board voted to give up the state title, as to stand up for the alcohol policy, yes, that is what it was. </p>
<p>Anyway, HERE, where lots are in ECs, including my own kids, if you are caught drinking even in your own home, you could face the entire myriad of consequences for substance abuse (suspensions, police notification, community service, counseling, etc.). </p>
<p>Separate from this specific topic, when lots of parents talk of their kids going out and drinking and so forth, I guess it is hard for me to understand parents not aware of their whereabouts and level of supervision and so forth. My kids were on a tighter leash ,perhaps but I always knew where they were, with whom, and they were almost always under supervised conditions. It may not have been impossible to drink but it would not have been easy to do. The stuff I read about kids going out for the night and drinking and what not, just was not in the realm of possibilities for my kids. I knew just about their every move and again, they were not allowed at unsupervised parties. Besides all that, they were far far too busy with EC endeavors to have time for that stuff.</p>
<p>Northstarmom’s post #188: “When it comes to being illegally in possession of booze on school grounds, this should also result in the police’s being called in just as occurs when students are found in possession of drugs.”</p>
<p>Finally, five pages into this thread, I hear the question I’ve been wanting to ask…if kids are getting HS suspensions for drinking, why are the police not involved? It is illegal, period. Why do so many schools, with the apparent complicity of the parents, give a wink and a nod to drinking, when they would never consider doing the same for other substances?</p>
<p>I have to add that I’m with Berurah and Binx on this issue. Underage drinking is illegal, and there’s no way I’m going to encourage my daughter to choose which laws she feels like abiding by on any given day. My daughter has been very clearly told over the years that if she chooses to drink when it’s illegal for her, we will in no way shield her from the consequences. Breaking the law and expecting the consequences = civil disobedience; breaking the law and hoping to avoid the consequences is criminal behavior. If she decides it is an issue for her, she can work through the system to change the law.</p>
<p>I recognize this sounds extraordinarily legalistic and lacking in compassion. This message has been communicated to her in a loving and supportive home in the context of ongoing conversations about life issues and temptations in general. I 'm well aware that my “good kid” could make some terrible decisions, and I’ve been particularly aware of the good kid goes wild at college possibility. We’ve talked about those sorts of concerns too, and I can only send her to college hoping that some of the conversations will stick. She will have outside motivation to stay clear of drinking (scholarship eligibility, concern over interaction with her daily meds, parental disapproval), and she appears, for now, to have strong internal motivation also (hates feeling out of control, faith-based belief in healthful living, and an extreme dislike of throwing up ;).) Whether any of that will be enough is the big question…</p>
<p>But, until then, my house, my rules…break 'em and life as she knows it will come to a screeching halt.</p>
<p>so please don’t insinuate that my comments are made because I’m unaware.</p>
<p>I was Chair of our School Council which is a combination of parents, staff, and community members for many years. The principal and vice principals, four teachers, a guidance counsellor, and two office staff were permanent member positions. Although it may have happened a few times over the years, it was not a problem anywhere near the extent that is being discussed here. There simply would not be the number of incidences in a school of 1500 kids which would make a significant difference in how guidance counsellors would report such problems in the college admissions process. I’m not saying that some of the kids there didn’t drink, I’m saying that the instances of them doing it on school property were rare.</p>
<p>Susan, no none of my children attended private schools, and our schools did not have any policy similar to the one employed at your school. I can’t imagine that type of policy which governs behavior outside of school hours and grounds would stand up legally if challenged.</p>
<p>Again, I’m not condoning or encouraging anyone, of any age, to drink. I think that it’s obvious from this long discussion and myriad of posts showing research data and experiences, that the current way of doing things isn’t working!! I have yet to hear any suggestions which might actually address the situation with the possibility of having any type of meaningful results.</p>
<p>Mezzomom, at our school, the list of consequences on a FIRST offense includes notification of police.</p>
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I think this epitomizes compassion…Enabling is NOT compassionate.</p>
<p>~berurah</p>