@crankyoldman Not sure why you’ve lately challenged and dismissed a number of my posts. So what If MY kids didn’t have a protest opportunity? They expressed their advocacy in other ways. MY feelings and beliefs about social responsibility remain in place. My history of involvement remains unchanged.
OP will ensure his kid knows more, already said as much.
I’m not giving advice, just relating my own thoughts. As are we all.
What injustice? The bullied girl was punished for hitting another student. Justified in her mind or not, she did it and the is a clear rule that anyone who hits another student is expelled/suspended. The school had no choice.
The girl who felt bullied may have a complaint against the punched bullier. That’s a harder case to prove as it wasn’t physical bullying. There should be a process for filing a complaint against someone who is always bullying you.
This is the really crux of the matter. Hitting another student is auto-suspension based on the rule/law; the Principal has no choice.
Instead of walking out of class, the students should march into a School Board meeting and explain why ‘zero tolerance’ should not be zero. Be proactive, and help change a law/reg/rule that you disagree with.
@lookingforward no idea what you are referring to about other threads, but on this thread you have a. advised the child to walk-out, apparently because you’ve got some sort of “social responsibility” credentials-even though your kids never did, and b have made it clear that you know how LORs will be written and how adcoms-specifically “tough” adcoms will react to student protests. That just isn’t possible, but you’ve done so anyway.
hey @crankyoldman I respect your opinion and appreciate you participating in the thread. But if you are directing your comments at an individual rather than trying to forward the discussion can you 2 handle it in private messages? I don’t want this thread to get shut down.
Thank you.
@dadof4kids I think you are handling this really well. I hope you and your wife and D come to agree on the way it all goes down.
Signed, daughter of parents who broke rules - in fact laws - in the pursuit of justice even though they got in big (adult) trouble for doing so.
I think all good with the wife. This isn’t the biggest parenting difference we have encountered, it probably isn’t even the biggest one that we are currently dealing with. She’s mildly annoyed, but we both laughed a little bit this morning realizing that really both of us should have known what the other one was thinking. I should have known she was looking for me to advise daughter to stay out of trouble, and she should have known I would tell daughter to go ahead and kick over the ant hill if it was necessary. Again, we’ve been together for 30 years. We don’t agree on everything, but we know what our differences are.
I do think an injustice has happened. The girl who threw the punch should have been disciplined, I get that. But my suspicion is that she hit a kid who frankly had it coming and needed to be hit. I think a couple days of in school suspension would be a punishment more fitting the crime. Actually in an ideal world I think a high five and a pat on the back would be the fitting punishment, but I realize there has to be some consequences because we don’t need the kids running up and down the halls punching each other.
Instead we probably have a girl who has been picked on and beaten down a bit by the world already who now is scrambling to find a place to continue her education. Maybe a fresh start is what she needs, but I’m guessing being uprooted from her friends is not what she wanted. And it probably involves mom having to drive her to and from a new school. who knows what moms work situation is and how much of a hardship that is for the family.
Plus it feeds into the narrative that everyone is out to get her. It just perpetuates the victim culture that we have. Overall I just see a bunch of negatives for society in general and this girl in particular and very few positives out of a punishment this severe.
So while I think that nothing will come of this protest, I want to be clear that I do think that an injustice is happening.
Plus the bully will move on to the next victim with impunity, maybe even trying to provoke a physical reaction.
It seems the school has a 0% tolerance towards physical violence but closer to a 100% tolerance to non-physical bullying. The protest may not help the girl who was disciplined, but it should help the next student who is bullied, hopefully before they feel the need to retaliate. The school needs to wake up and protect their students before the need for an expulsion comes right up in their face. It’s just laziness to let things get that far.
And as a side note - some student protest can be punished for any reason at all it seems. Remember the “bong hits 4 Jesus” case? I think SCOTUS flubbed that one but it’s the law of the land for now.
Not disputing the school’s right to discipline protesters, but I am confident that a disciplinary record due to a principled and peaceful protest would not adversely affect a student’s future at the vast majority of colleges.
Signed,mother of such a h.s. protester
Letting kids dictate the disciplinary policies of the school is a case of letting the inmates run the asylum. Walking out of school is childish and immature behavior.
We will just have to disagree. I thinking taking a principled stand by walking out of places has a long and proud history in this country and has led to social progress.
^Talk about apples and oranges. These aren’t protests from sophisticated adults in the civil rights marches. These are protests from young kids upset at the severity of a school punishment. If we don’t trust middle school kids enough to let them drive, vote, vape, enter into a legal contract, own a gun, or drink alcohol, why would we give their opinions anything other than zero weight when it comes to how to run the school disciplinary process? K-12 schools don’t operate as student-run democracies for good reasons.
I think it’s easy as a parent, and even as an adult working in a school, to be blind to what is going on with students in a school on so many fronts and the environment kids live in. We tell them to take their concerns to the authorities who, in the end, cannot help. But the kid who has reported has just added to his list of concerns having “squealed” and retribution is almost certain (and maybe not on school property or time.)
Kids are forced to handle things on their own. If a peaceful protest is the voice they want to use, let them. I hope someone is listening and can actually advance the conversation. And I think that it can be helpful for an administration to see the size of the response, if only to help them appreciate how many kids are feeling affected/threatened by the policies they don’t have or don’t enforce. And it will help the girl who was punished for snapping to know that others saw what happened and care.
Young kids are often the ones most affected by certain problems (gun violence schools, for example) so I would expect they may have informed opinions on many subjects, and perspectives adults may not have. Intelligent thought is not limited to adults.
You might be surprised how much authority a school has. I know I was.
Back in middle school, there was some bullying going on with my D. I had just assumed that since it was on the internet, the school could do nothing, so we just sucked it up and got over it.
But at the same time, I was also active in the District Office as a parent volunteer to a special program. One day I got to talking with the Asst Super for Elementary Ed and the topic was bulling, etc. He told me that if we had reported my D’s situation, they could easily pull up every social media post made from school computers (which many bullies stupidly use). And then they could have had the police open a confidential investigation and pull warrants if necessary.
Most kids who have been bullied have told me that the price of that adult “help” will be more, crueler, and better hidden bullying. And they have reached that conclusion through experience. I don’t want to suggest that adults don’t want to help and/or don’t have some tools to do so, but that kids who have to seek help often suffer for it. If it were thoroughly b as ked into the culture of the school, it’d be different, but as one boy said “if I am so weak that I need the school’s help, I am the kid the others want to bully because I am weak and a target.”
I agree that adult intervention has less of as stigma in elementary school.
Please assure me this is not meant seriously, it’s hard to tell tone from an online post.
Add me to the list of fans of your daughter, OP. We need people willing to stand up for what is right.
My youngest stepped in several times to intervene in situations he felt were unfair. He did get in trouble for it at the school but not from us. I like to think the world will be a little better and a little safer with kids like that around us.
The punishment for a physical altercation is to be suspended or expelled. It’s an objective standard, not subjective.
It would be like marching on the courthouse if a judge had to sentence a third time offender to the mandatory sentence. You may not agree, but that’s the law. That law doesn’t get changed by people picketing the courthouse, it can only be changed by petitioning the legislature.
Here the students need to picket the school board. Good luck because I sure there are plenty of people who don’t think it is a bad rule to forbid physical contact between students and to set a penalty which bill be the same for all.