<p>I read the article, maybe people on this thread should read it too. I don’t think any child should be afraid or uncomfortable about going to school. At the same time no one is willing to stand up to name who is doing the hazing. Before we paint a big stroke of kids at Milburn or parents around that school district, lets get the fact straight first. I can’t help but feel there is a lot of jealousy going on here. </p>
<p>My kids’ private school is not exactly lilly white either. Same could be said of Morristown high, there kids are afraid to go to bathrooms without a code world. I am not seeing anyone screaming about banning their kids from going to colleges or question the principal’s stand on hazing or bullying. As Milburn principal said, “If we catch a kid with the list, the kid could say he/she just picked it up from the floor.”</p>
<p>Oldfort, I am not jealous. My D went to a highperforming school where this type of stuff is not tolerated. Do kids make mistakes yes? But at her school, the administration dealt with it and made it clear it was not acceptable. So it didnt escalate. I dont want kids going to college with her if they have been trained to haze and taught that adults dont care. </p>
<p>This is the same principal who brought dogs in the school to sniff for drugs. Well guess what, the same kid who could say he borrowed a jacket with weed in it could say he picked up the list. Total lack of consistency here. Its simple. You tell kids if they have the list on them, they will be subject to disclipanary treatment. Tell them if they see the list on the floor tell a teacher. And btw tell the teachers to get out in the hallway the first few days and keep their eyes open. None of this is rocket science.</p>
<p>kayf - why are you so angry about this. Do you think by not allowing any of those students from Milburn go to college, you could protect your daughter? Do you really think this only happens in Short Hills? By reading the article, I am not even sure what they did,other than the list. We are not even sure what happened once someone made it to the list, did it enhance their social life or destroy it. The article wasn’t clear.</p>
<p>We get communication from our school about zero tolerance for drugs or alcohol, do you really think then there is no drinking or drugs at our school? Our school has expelled kids for cheating almost every year, but there are still a handful of students who would still cheat. On the other hand, there are many students from our school who work very hard and are up standing citizens. I am sure that’s the case at Milburn High, it is no better or worse than any high school.</p>
<p>Idad, I have 2 good kids who put their heads down, work hard and have significant ECs outside school. Our school culture is not of the type being described here. But if it were, they wouldn’t be part of it. The only reason they attend the Hs they do is because of where their parents happen to choose a home. It is not an intentional community that they joined and it is reprehensible to suggest that innocent students be held responsible for the actions of other kids for which they have no commonality other than their parents chose to live in the same town. Might as well blacklist any kid born in the same hospital; that’s how nonsensical it is. Find and punish the perpetrators. Don’t punish the innocent.</p>
<p>Pizza girl and I rarely agree! (Here we do agree.) However, we both posted about the same school in the Chcago suburbs which had a hazing incident four or five years ago. The kids who were engaged in excessive stuff were punished…by the law, actually, but this did happen outside of the school.</p>
<p>Frankly, I don’t have any idea how keeping ALL the kids from going to a nice college is anything but adult hazing. If they were caught and found guilty, they should face the appropriate consequences.</p>
<p>Around here, a well known school had some drinking issues around the whole graduation thing and prom thing…now there are lockins. You can come to the pary but you can’t leave til the morning. These are very big public high schools and we all do it for our kids classes. Why? Because the school allowed the police to get involved once and no other parents wanted those consequences for thier kids.</p>
<p>Did it stop the drinking on other nights for the excessive drinkers? I really doubt it. But it kept it out of the school functions and away from the kids who just wanted to go to prom or graduation. There are ways to handle these things which do not punish the kids who aren’t part of the problem.</p>
<p>Surely the criminal justice system can deal with situations like this. Individual incidents (pushed in locker), let’s see, assault and battery, kidnapping. The school principal who facilitates the whole infrastructure - racketeering sounds good for him.</p>
<p>“Racketeering is defined as the process of forming or running an organization to operate or commit or otherwise execute ongoing criminal activities.”</p>
<p>@post 39 above, I certainly would not like to have a whistle blown in my face or people laughing behind my back because I went to look for the rooftop pool. (My old HS actually had a pool- in the basement- not in a particularly prestigious locale either.) I actually think that when a school is in a top locale, they should make an effort to make a good example, not a lousy one. Yes this is only a few kids who make a bad reputation for many, but a positive community call for change is called for.</p>
<p>By the way, passing around a “sl*t” list is not ok. Just because they did not catch this behavior or similar elsewhere doesn’t make it ok in Millburn. Reacting to bullying by saying that the victim should just shrug it off is not ok either. Its ok if they call you names, but not ok if they hit you? Not really. So long as you are pretty and they call you ugly its ok because it doesn’t hurt? How about when they make you feel that you are ugly? Yes there are alot worse offenses in life than name calling, but in HS there is a responsibility to teach that disrespect for others is not proper behavior.</p>
<p>Oldfort, I am angry because there is a reasonable expectation that in schools with resources to deal with bullying it should be dealt with. My heart goes out to parents who have to choice but to send their kids to neighborhoold schools with inadequate resources, </p>
<p>What is right is for the good parents and the good kids, whom I suspect are in the majority, to put pressure on the school to change this. On one of the student blogs, there was a note that in the past suspensions for hazing were not put on transcripts. A suspension not put on a record is zilch in terms of punsishmnet – if they werent going to put on a transcript, they should have given detentions, taken away team leadership positions, parking permits etc. At this point, the School Board should demand an inquiry into the accuracy of transcripts, along with a program to stop hazing. The letter by the Superintendent is totally ineffectual and he should know it.</p>
<p>Statements like that make me really, really sad. And frustrated. </p>
<p>And beyond that, to say it’s not the school’s problem to control the behavior of students within their school, because it’s the parents’ fault, makes no sense to me. If students wield knives, should we also say it’s not the school’s fault to control them or make the atmosphere safe, and for that matter, should we also blame the knifees’ parents for bad upbringing when they don’t adequately defend themselves?</p>
<p>I don’t see any of those parents actually standing up and naming those students, everyone is hiding behind “I don’t want to get involved” but I want you to fix it. According to the article, parents are making complaints, but they don’t want to identify anyone because they are afraid their kids would be outcasts (you can’t have the cake and eat it too). If it was my kid that was getting bullied, 1) I would know about it, 2) I would have been at the school so fast it would make their heads spin, 3) I wouldn’t be above in taking legal actions against those bully’s parents.</p>
<p>When I referred to bullying in my earlier post it was in reference to hazing in college because kayf seemed to make the jump that those senior girls would somehow become danger to her daughter in college. I just think we, as parents, could teach our kids to have enough confidence not to be bullied into doing anything they don’t want to do because of peer pressure. We are not talking about kids using knifes, so to extrapolate what I have said and apply it to kids being threatened of their lives is a far stretch. I think that’s what happens on this forum. People can’t stick to what’s in front of them, and always feel the need of taking one phrase out of context.</p>
<p>Oldfort, according to the article, at least two parents did go on record with the principal. “In a telephone interview this morning, Dr. Miron said he had received six or seven reports this year from parents about incidents of hazing, but three or four of them were anonymous, and not enough information could be gathered about the others to lead school officials to the older students responsible” Which would mean at least two parents were not anonymous. And does he not write down calls? How can he not know exact numbers? Does he ask for details from anon callers? Or does he just hope they go away. </p>
<p>“The father and his wife reported the locker-slamming incident to a vice principal and the superintendent.”</p>
<p>“Dr. Miron was well aware of the entire hazing ritual, from how it is planned to who it targets.”</p>
<p>“In past years, students found responsible for hazing have been suspended, with up to six senior girls in one year earning three to five days out of school” – but now the student blogger is saying it didnt go on a transcript – what type of punishment is being sent home, with no suspension on record. Obviously ineffective. Duhh. </p>
<p>There have been many comments on CC about hazing and sororities, etc. I do think that when kids are encouraged to bully it continues and escalates. Maybe not to knives, but to required excessive drinking, putting kids in trunks and dropping them off across town naked, etc. Then what happens when people defend themselves? Or people who are collateral damage. </p>
<p>When a school does nothing, the victims are afraid. Please do not blame the victims, as when people come forward the school does nothing. Its time for the good people to stand up and demand better.</p>
<p>I don’t think I would take everything what bloggers write on the internet as the ultimate truth. We have seen time and time again that not everything we read is true, and we must allow authorities to do proper investigation. Statements like:</p>
<p>“Dr. Miron was well aware of the entire hazing ritual, from how it is planned to who it targets.”</p>
<p>Where is the proof for that, because some blogger said it?</p>
<p>There are a lot worse things happening at our public high schools out there - like kids are in fear of their lifes when they go to school. My kids do not to go Milburn, and I certainly do not have first hand or second hand information on severity of the situation, but I can’t help but to think Milburn high is being made a target here.</p>
<p>And, that is why I believe colleges should start blacklisting these schools. The high schools are participating in a cover-up of hazing and drinking infractions specfically designed to prevent that information from being considered by college admissions offices. In many cases, high schools are writing glowing recommendations of students who have been suspended for illegal activity.</p>
<p>I don’t know, but this system of sweeping infractions under the rug needs to stop. There are ten applicants for every slot. Why should someone arrested and suspended for underage drinking or hazing in high school get one of these slots because the parents and administrators at high schools and colleges condone, perhaps even endorse, this behavior?</p>
<p>The threat of Biffy or Buffy losing their shot at Princeton would make it stop TODAY.</p>
<p>Oldfort–I didn’t say it was equivalent to violence. But the situation is analogous in the idea that victims are responsible for their victimhood. It’s palpably ridiculous when a violent action occurs, but why is it different when the action is bullying? How does the type of oppression determine that the one being attacked is more or less responsible? Isn’t the attacker always the one responsible for his/her actions, whether attacking violently, psychologically, or some threatening mix of the two?</p>
<p>Oldfort, I do not automatically beleive everything a blogger says it true, but I strongly suspect this one is, and that is why the Board should demand an investigation. </p>
<p>The statement re Dr. Miron was from the NYTimes. If it was not true, I suspect by now he would have demanded a retraction. No retraction. </p>
<p>I dont see how Millburn is being targeted. I have no bone to pick. I have no kids still in HS. As to other schools having more severe problems, for the nth time, those schools have significantly less resources.</p>
<p>For those who are not aware of it, the article appeared in a PRINT [caps deliberate] edition of the NY Times last week; it was apparently written by the same woman who writes the “Local” blog, which covers Millburn and two neighboring towns. My possibly naive assumption is that the Times does not print stuff that hasn’t been fact-checked. I would expect the “real” [i.e. hard copy/print] Times to maintain journalistic standards that certainly seem to lapse in comments and blogs everywhere. I was, however, surprised that the reporter was willing to accede to parental requests to withhold names of girls she had spoken to.</p>
<p>As an added aside from a nonresident observer, albeit one who is somewhat familiar with the area: Millburn is certainly highly affluent but not really a Biffy and Buffy sort of place. Rather, it is a town where some people have a lot of money and others aspire to wealth and upward mobility. There are small houses and even a few not-lovely apartment complexes as well as those classic upper-middle class sidewalk-suburb neighborhoods and the more spacious Short Hills section where there are indeed some mansions or almost-mansions. There are in every neighborhood people of varied ethnicities, including recent Asian and eastern European immigrants; I doubt that even the fall-sport jockettes (that would be soccer and tennis primarily I imagine) are all Buffy types. </p>
<p>It sounded from the article as though the principle was clueless, but in one way or another administrators often are. The bullies sounded awful and the people the reporter interviewed sounded scared. It was a disturbing article that as far as I am aware has received little if any followup coverage either in the Times or in the Newark Star-Ledger. I don’t know if that means there is a coverup going on or if the reporting was poor to start with and there isn’t as much of a story as it seemed–more likely people are just afraid to talk. But honestly, to blacklist a whole school seems egregiously unfair; I am sure that there are dozens of kids in each class at the high school who are totally uninvolved and I can’t imagine how victimizing them (and it would be victimizing) would do anyone any good or even be any more ethical than the original misbehavior. The rich and mean almost always have a way out; the regular folks rarely do.</p>
<p>I wasn’t going to contribute to this thread any more, but because garland often brings up valid points, I will address it.</p>
<p>I believe it takes two to tangle when it comes to oppression, except in the situation where one side has a lot more power than another (like parent and child). Even in an abusive situation of husband/wife (it would be either way). Attacker is responsible for his/her action, but attackee could also choose whether he/she wants to be in the situation and how he/she wants to react to it. I am always of the mind set of we can’t control how other people act or feel, but we have control of whether we are willing to put up with it. In the case of spouse abuse, the abused person (whether it’s psychological or economical situation) feel he/she has no other alternatives and needs to to continue to put up with the abuse. In the case of sorority or fraternity hazing (abuse), one puts up with it because he/she also feels there is no alternative if he/she wants to be accepted and be popular. I think in many of those cases, victim could be empowered to do something about it. Victim could refuse to join a sorority/fraternity that practices hazing. Abused wife/husband could be trained for a job to be financially independent, or seek counseloring to not feel they deserved to be abused any more (I am not an expert, and I am sure there is a lot more to it than what I am saying). That is why I come back to parents and family over and over again. If those abusers had better upbringing and their parents did not tolerate that kind of behavior, maybe they wouldn’t do that to other people. If those abused had told their parents, if their parents took them seriously and protected them then they would know it’s not ok for them to be treated as such.</p>
<p>I thinks it is all a complicated issue. I just don’t think it rests squarely on the school and it’s administrators. The parents and community as a whole have to own up some if its own responsibilities.</p>
<p>OF–bullying certainly is complicated. But in the end, in a public school with required attendance, the bottom line is that it is up to the administrators to, to the best of their ability, make it a safe space for the students. For me, it’s a buck stops here issue.</p>
<p>Of course their abusers and their families also bear shame and responsiblity. But to say kids should just avoid abusers is not fair. OK as to sororities (note to self, letter to my old sorority re Millburn), but what about school sponsered athletic teams. And certainly you would not propose Millburn parents home school their kids to avoid abusers. Here parents have reported it, the school is aware, and has not done anything. Oh right, letter from Superintendent. More pressure is needed. Kudos to the Times. </p>
<p>Mattsmom, if we are to believe the Times, the school administration was aware and did nothing. They were not clueless, they chose not to act. My guess is there will be follow up after tonight’s Board meeting.</p>
<p>kay–I meant clueluess in terms of no idea of how to do the right thing, not clueless in terms of being unaware of situation–sorry for the careless/slangy wording.</p>