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Bang! Boys suspended for pointing pencils

May 8, 2013 by 20 Comments

Two Virginia second graders were suspended for two days for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. The two boys are 7 years old.

“When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.”

The teacher wrote on the suspension note that the boy put down the pencil when asked, said Marshall, a former Marine.

Suffolk Public Schools spokeswoman Bethanne Bradshaw said the district has a zero-tolerance policy for weapons that includes pointing a finger or pencil in a threatening way and drawing a picture of a gun. “Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community,” Bradshaw said.

Filed Under: Safety, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , ,

7-year-old suspended for pastry pistol

March 3, 2013 by

At a Maryland elementary school, a 7-year-old boy was suspended for two days for nibbling a pastry into the shape of a gun at snack time. Joshua claims he was trying to make a mountain. The teacher disagreed.

No one was threatened or harmed by the pastry, the boy’s father said. I guess that means he didn’t point his Pop-Tart and say “bang.”

A Google image search for “poptart gun” turned up this image, reports Reason‘s Hit & Run. Apparently, Joshua isn’t the only boy with a taste for weaponry. Or mountains.

 

Filed Under: Safety, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , ,

The boys at the back

February 7, 2013 by

“Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college, writes Christina Hoff Sommers in The Boys at the Back in the New York Times.

Elementary teachers give boys lower grades than their test scores would have predicted, according to a study in The Journal of Human Resources. Boys can’t keep up with girls in “attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently,” the researchers say.

. . . one critic told me recently, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy and unfocused workers. But unproductive workers are adults — not 5-year-olds. If boys are restless and unfocused, why not look for ways to help them do better? As a nation, can we afford not to?

In a revised version of her book, The War on Boys, Sommers hits “boy-averse trends like the decline of recess, zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, the tendency to criminalize minor juvenile misconduct and the turn away from single-sex schooling.”

As our schools have become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, collaboration-oriented and sedentary, they have moved further and further from boys’ characteristic sensibilities.

Male underachievement in school is a global phenomenon. The British, the Canadians and the Australians are experimenting with ways to  help boys do well in school, Sommers writes. That ranges from “boy-friendly reading assignments” to single-sex classes.

At Aviation High School in New York City, students spend half their day learning traditional subjects and the other half on aviation mechanics.

. . .  I observed a classroom of 14- and 15-year-olds focused on constructing miniaturized, electrically wired airplane wings from mostly raw materials. In another class, students worked in teams — with a student foreman and crew chief — to take apart and then rebuild a small jet engine in just 20 days.

The school’s 2,200 pupils — mostly students of color, from low-income households — have a 95 percent attendance rate and a 90 percent graduation rate, with 80 percent going on to college.

. . . “The school is all about structure,” an assistant principal, Ralph Santiago, told me. The faculty emphasizes organization, precision, workmanship and attention to detail.

Aviation High is co-ed, but only 16 percent of students are girls. The school has received the district’s “A” rating six years in a row.

“Vocational high schools with serious academic requirements are an important part of the solution to male disengagement from school,” Sommers concludes.

Ilana Garon couldn’t control a nearly all-male special ed class, until her female co-teacher was replaced by a male teacher, she writes on Ed Week‘s View from the Bronx.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Safety first: Schools where kids can learn

January 10, 2013 by

Student learning requires a positive school climate and effective discipline policies, concludes Ed Week‘s Quality Counts 2013.

National initiatives to improve schools tend to focus heavily on curriculum, testing, and personnel. But a growing consensus also recognizes that the elements that make up school climate—including peer relationships, students’ sense of safety and security, and the disciplinary policies and practices they confront each day—play a crucial part in laying the groundwork for academic success.

I agree that a safe, orderly school environment is the first step to learning — though not the whole journey.

Ed Week looks at ”zero tolerance” discipline policies, now mercifully falling out of favor, and “promising alternative models that seek to reduce conflict and ensure schoolhouse safety without resorting to expulsion or out-of-school suspension.”

In the classroom arena, they document ways in which educators are working to bolster students’ ability to cope with academic and personal pressures that can interfere with learning and lead to peer conflict and bullying.

. . . Finally, this package examines factors often left out of the school climate discussion: the role of parents and community groups—and even of a school’s physical design and layout—in the learning environment.

In addition, there’s a survey of teachers’ and administrators’ views on school climate, safety and discipline. 

Filed Under: Bullying, Education, Safety, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Student suspended for Sandy Hook poem

January 2, 2013 by

A San Francisco high school senior was suspended — and could be expelled — for writing a poem about the Sandy Hook massacre. “I know why he pulled the trigger,” wrote Courtni Webb, 17, in a notebook. She thinks gunman Adam Lanza felt isolated and unloved.

Webb goes to the Life Learning Academy, a small charter school for “troubled” students, including those with arrest records. It has a “zero tolerance” policy against violence, which school administrators say the poem violated. A letter to Courtni’s mother said the poem “contained deeply concerning, and threatening language.”

Here’s part of the poem:

They wanna hold me back
I run but still they still attack
My innocence, I won’t get back
I used to smile
They took my kindness for weakness
The silence the world will never get
I understand the killing in Conecticut
I know why he pulled the trigger
The government is a shame
Society never wants to take the blame
Society puts these thoughts in our head
Misery loves company
If I can’t be loved no one can

Writing about violence isn’t the same as wanting to commit violence, says Courtni.

The poem doesn’t read like a threat to me.

 

Filed Under: Safety, Violence, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , ,

Federal discipline rules could hurt blacks

December 15, 2012 by

Sen. Dick Durbin’s hearing on the “school to prison pipeline” may lead to federal mandates to curtail the use of out-of-school suspensions,  make suspension policies uniform across schools, or both, writes Andrew Coulson of Cato @ Liberty, who testified against zero-tolerance policies at the hearing.

Black students are more likely to be suspended than whites. However, requiring lenient discipline policies would hurt black students the most, Coulson writes.

In Understanding the Black-White School Discipline Gap, Rochester University Professor Joshua Kinsler concludes that black and white students are suspended at the same rates for the same offenses at the same schools, Coulson writes.

However principals at predominantly black schools issue more and longer suspensions to all students — black and white — while discipline policies are more lenient for all students at predominantly white schools.

In a subsequent empirical study, Kinsler investigated what would happen if all schools were compelled to observe a more lenient suspension policy, to close the black/white discipline gap. He found that this would disproportionately hurt the achievement of African American students, widening the black/white achievement gap.  The reason for this, according to Kinsler’s findings, is that serious suspensions do in fact discourage misbehavior, and that removing disruptive students from the class does improve the achievement of the other students.

In his written testimony, Coulson proposed alternatives to out-of-school suspensions that motivate students to behave while protecting their classmates from disruption.

Filed Under: Education, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

School OKs deaf child’s name sign

August 30, 2012 by

After banning a preschooler from signing his name – they think it looks like a gun – Grand Island, Nebraska school officials have relented. Three-year-old Hunter Spanjer wil be allowed to use his name sign. (There’s a video at the link of the boy making the sign. It doesn’t look like anything in particular to me.)

The boy’s family registered his sign with S.E.E. which stands for Signing Exact English. He uses crossed-fingers to show it is uniquely his own. When Hunter’s parents were told the sign violates the district’s weapons policy, they threatened to bring in lawyers from the National Association of the Deaf.

I wonder if Grand Island objects to Hunter’s name in spoken English. After all, what do hunters use?

Filed Under: Children, Disability, Education, Safety, Violence, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , ,

California rethinks ‘zero tolerance’

April 17, 2012 by

California lawmakers are rethinking “zero-tolerance” discipline laws that require schools to suspend or expel students caught selling drugs, brandishing a knife, possessing a firearm or explosive or sexually assaulting someone, reports the Oakland Tribune.

In the 2009-10 school year, 7 percent of K-12 students, 13 percent of those with disabilities and 18 percent of black students were suspended for at least one day in California schools, according to UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.

Assemblymember V. Manuel Perez, D-Coachella, has introduced a bill to end automatic suspension, except for firearm and explosives possession. In addition, principals would not be required to report illegal activities to law enforcement authorities.

. . .  it would require a governing board’s decision to expel a student to be based not only on the act itself, but on the grounds that “other means of correction are not feasible or have repeatedly failed to bring about proper conduct.”

Another bill would remove “defiance” as grounds for out-of-school suspension, but would let schools impose in-school suspension. “Willful defiance” leads to 40 percent of school suspensions, reports AP.

School suspensions were once reserved for serious offenses including fighting and bringing weapons or drugs on campus. But these days they’re just as likely for talking back to a teacher, cursing, walking into class late or even student eye rolling.

More than 40 percent of suspensions in California are for “willful defiance,” or any behavior that disrupts class, and critics say it’s a catchall that needs to be eliminated because it’s overused for trivial offenses, disproportionately used against black and Latino boys and alienates the students who need most to stay in school.

“It’s so broad it’s not useful,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president and chief executive of the nonprofit South Los Angeles Community Coalition. “You can’t quite define what it means, what it doesn’t mean.”

 I’ve never been a fan of zero tolerance and in-school suspension seems like a smart idea, but doesn’t this seem like a rather wide pendulum swing? It’s going to be difficult for a school board to expel a student for sexual assault or brandishing a knife.

Filed Under: Education, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Schools are rethinking zero tolerance

June 3, 2011 by

More schools are rethinking zero tolerance policies, reports the Washington Post.

In Delaware, for example, zero-tolerance cases were a repeated issue in the Christina School District, where a 6-year-old with a camping utensil that included a knife was suspended in 2009. Discipline procedures were revamped last year, giving administrators the discretion to consider a student’s intent and grade, as well as the risk of harm. Out-of-school suspensions in the state’s largest school system fell by one-third in a year.

Researchers have found no evidence that zero-tolerance policies keep schools safer, according to a 2008 article in the American Psychological Association journal.

Discretion! What a radical idea! Maybe that 12-year girl with a couple of Advil isn’t a drug dealer in the making.

As Instapundit puts it: About freaking time.

Filed Under: Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , ,

The wrong lunchbox

December 29, 2010 by

A North Carolina girl who accidentally took her father’s lunchbox to school has been suspended for the rest of her senior year: Dad had packed a small paring knife to eat an apple.

Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, a top student and soccer star, hadn’t been in trouble before. She now faces misdemeanor charges for bringing a weapon on campus. That could end her hopes for a soccer scholarship. “When you have a criminal record no school’s going to look at you,” she said. Smithwick  is taking online courses through Central Carolina Community College to earn her diploma.

Lee County Superintendent Jeff Moss told the Sanford Herald that it’s up to the principal to determine a student’s “true intent.”

“Bottom line is we want to ensure every child feels safe on our campus.”

A commenter writes:

“Let’s have the students feel safe. How about letting them feel like their entire lives and livelihood aren’t at risk at your institution from an honest mistake. You are ruining this child’s life and future because some bonehead can’t recognize an honest mistake.”

Close the school, writes Instapundit.  Children aren’t safe from stupid school officials.

Update:  The superintendent says a three-inch knife was found in Smithwick’s purse.  On PJ Media, Bryan Preston has a photo of the “purse,” which is a BYO brand lunch tote.  The school also says Smithwick is enrolled at the school. But she’s banned from campus. 

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