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“Zero tolerance” policy on fighting. Any “active” participation resulted in automatic suspension. That part sounds fine, but active participation included things like holding up your hands in self defense or trying to push the person sitting on your chest while punching you in the face off of you.
I really don’t understand why schools have this rule (at least in many places in the US). Are they trying to teach you to not practice self defense and just let it happen? Doesn’t sound like a great thing to teach.
It’s easy for the administrators. No investigation, no attempt to understand what happened.
Since the late 90s, school admins have become increasingly “police state light”; multiple vice principals with walkie-talkies, metal detectors, 3 hour after school detention, saturday detention, in-school suspension (you go sit in a room in silence for literally the entire school day), and zero tolerance. Imagine getting punched in the face and THEN being expelled for it. And I’m not even talking about “rough inner-city schools” or whatever; this shit happened in the Berkshires.
Of course, all their security theatre commands a budget increase and attempts to instill a sense of fear of the state into students.
We’re worried about school board meetings being taken over now but the administrations went full right wing fascist 30 years ago.
And nobody cares because once they get through school, they never have to deal with it again. It’s an endless cycle of suffering, and nobody who is capable of stopping it is willing to do so.
Maybe its internet hokum, or maybe its real, I dont know.
by my favorite story I ever saw, that outlined how stupid the zero tolerance shit was, and how destructive it was, was a kid in the last year of highschool who moved over the weekend, and apparently a butterknife fell out of one of the boxes, and you could see if you really smashed your face up against the rear driver side window and looked really hard under the drivers seat… Which someone, apparently, did, and got the kid expelled for bringing dangerous weapons to school.
a butterknife isnt even a goddamn danger to butter. Muchless a human being. Especially when its locked in the goddamn car.
Because bad parents. Kids who are bullies usually have parents who are bullies, and even when their kid is the instigator, they will defend their kid and bully teachers and administrators into lifting punishment. Zero tolerance means that discretion is removed and everyone is punished.
The changes in parents the last few decades is why schools are so awful.
Looking at it from the other side, it’s actually rare that an innocent kid is beat up without context.
Usually there’s 2 kids that have a beef and have been egging each other on for days. Eventually one kid says something and the other kid snaps and makes the first move but the second kid was just as guilty.
If you only look at “who started it” the second kid gets off scot free, while the first kid gets punished. Not really fair.
"Zero tolerance " attempts to fix this by recognizing that both kids likely played a part.
You are delusional to the highest degree. Kids in school don’t fight even, it’s one-sided 99% of the time.
The reason for this (and the rule) is bullying. Bullies fight bullied, and everyone gets suspended because “they were fighting”. Since you announced in advance that was the policy, this enables you to conveniently ignore the bullying that has taken place, and instead act as if all bullying-related fights (read: all fights pretty much) are simple fights that do not require any more attention because the issue has been dealth with with punishment.
In turn, this means that a bully who already has a bad rap and generally doesn’t care about grades or standing with school admin because both are already at rock bottom can target any one kid and make their admin standing rock bottom because it will appear as if that kid is fighting all the time and constantly suspended.
There’s no “other side”. The kid who initiated violence is the one in the wrong, even if the other one has been egging him on. “Oh but what if the egging on is one sided and the kid can’t take it anymore?” That is a symptom of your bullying reporting being garbage, not of the natural order of kids. If that kid is taking it out violently it means they’ve tried every other avenue including telling an adult and nothing has changed.
I’m not saying it’s right, just that’s their rationale. I literally discussed this with a middle school principal a few days ago and that was what she said.
Regardless of what you think about the policy, the fact is that your kids will have to abide by it.
Fact: if your kid is being bullied, they need to communicate to a person of authority. Answering a bully with violence is the wrong choice 99% of the time. They are usually bigger than you and have backup.
Also usually it doesn’t progress to a fight the very first time, usually it takes weeks, and during this time you would have many opportunities to tell a teacher or something.
Again, not advocating that this is right, but that’s their rationale.
Bullying is a one directional situation. It’s straight physical and mental abuse. And saying zero tolerance is right because it’s two way or the bullied kid can tell an adult is akin to saying a woman could just leave the man beating her.
It’s naive. It’s harmful. And it’s ineffective.
Your middle school principal you discussed with this is only a single administrator. I’m sure different schools have had various rationale for implementing the policy and any anecdotal response doesn’t speak to the entirety of school administrators.
And what I’m saying is that the school administrator has a vested interest in “removing bullying” by making all bullying-related in incidents be actually something else.
I agree that violence is never the answer, but maybe next time instead of talking to someone who wants to not have to deal with bullying, talk to the students who are being bullied. I guarantee you that every single one of them has tried to alert an adult and the reaction was either “well he’s not doing anything too bad so I can’t do anything” or “he’s been put in detention temporarily and I am the only one aware that it was related to bullying”.
Every single instance of kids fighting in schools can be fixed by having actual support systems in place against bullying. Figure out who the bullies are, and remove them from the bullied’s life. Treat bullying as we treat parental abuse currently, it should be unacceptable that a treacher knew what was happening and did nothing, yet it happens daily.
Fact: currently, if a kid is being is being bullied, they need to learn how to end a fight.
What exactly is a person of authority going to do of you go to them? If they are going to actually do anything, is that thing going to stop it? I guarantee it won’t. Their rational might be this, but as it stands either you are blissfully unaware of the reality of bulling or you are aware and simply do not care.
I ran afoul of this.
Someone came up and suckerpunched the absolute fuck out of me from behind, Was someone who I never even interacted with, commented towards, or even thought about. I still think, to this day, he just wanted to look like a bad ass by hitting the biggest kid in the grade.
Because they used a crutch to get around due to a gimpy leg, and because I was over a foot taller, I was deemed the aggressor… and no amount of witnesses saying otherwise would convince the principle of my innocence. and because the office was so convinced of it, no one in my family believed me either, so no one fought against it. I had to complete a program for “violent” teens before I was allowed to return to school… a program that was little more than slave labor in the hottest not-summer-break months, where I got accused of being a (gay slur) because only (Gay slur)'s drink their drinks the way I did, apparently. Was a super happy fun time learning experience.
I totally don’t still carry the rage and bitterness about it to this day at all. Nope. not at all.
Zero tolerance anything is just lazy and worthless. Only reason to implement is so you don’t have to think or acknowledge any nuance. Admin can just shrug their shoulders and go “Sorry nothing I can do. Zero tolerance.”
If they are truly zero tolerance then any teacher or security guard who steps in to break up the fight should also be suspended. They participated.
In 5th grade they defined every kid that can speak another language as ESL (English as a second language) even if you spoke English perfectly. Then they put all of the ESL kids in a different class on the opposite side of the school. The result was that the school became de facto racially segregated with all Asian and Latino kids on one side and all white kids on the other. It’s not like it served a purpose anyway since none of the teachers could speak anything other than English.
I wonder if segregation was the intention.
That’s the only thing that makes any sense
Sadly, that’s sounds very intentional
That’s ridiculous, as a father of a future bilingual baby I would raise hell or move schools.
My high school had a rule about the “difficulty” of books you could read. You weren’t supposed to read too high “above your grade”. I assumed this rule was something with the school library and their Accelerated Reader program.
Nope! Tried to give me ISS because I was reading “Screwjack”, which I brought from home. It wasn’t even in class! I was a fucking junior. A high school junior should be able to handle Hunter S. Thompson.
According to them it was “college level” and therefore I shouldn’t be reading it. My father raised absolute hell in that office. Don’t think they tried enforcing that rule again.
They also tried bitching about girls tops until a group of very pissed off redneck fathers had questions about how they were touching the students to measure the width.
The AR Reading program that was popular in the early 2000s was an absolute disaster. It basically killed my love of reading for almost 10 years. They wouldn’t let me read books “above my level” based on some BS test that used timed reading. I wasn’t dumb, I just sub-vocalized when I read like a lot of people, so I read slowly. Read slow, don’t finish the test, grade poor, so “no books for you!” said the school.
I get the fact that reading too high above your grade means you may be way over your head in vocabulary and grammar, but it’s not entirely applicable to everyone. I read Pride and Prejudice and one friend said I sounded posh from the language I accidentally started using. So if a high schooler or junior high schooler can handle it, why not?
If a kid is truly over their head with a book, it won’t be long until they get bored and quit, unless they’re just trying to impress someone and aren’t interested in the book itself.
Kids should be allowed to unlimited learning and curiosity, this spark you have as a child is very powerful if you let it happen and nurture it instead of trying to fit all students in an iron cast thinking that you know what’s best for them.
They also tried removed
This! This right here! This comment was edited by the mods or a censor bot! I fucking told you guys they were doing it!
I raised hell under a different name for a politically motivated mod changing my comments to agree with them, so I copied all the original comments into a word document and would edit them back to the original after the mod kept changing it, and they banned that username. This is some bullshit, and it needs to fucking stop.
Sorry you have to find out this way, but your home instance is run by the authoritarian fanboys who build Lemmy and engineered a filtering of “slurs” like bit–ching (modifying it for your benefit as people not from lemmy.ml can see the original word) directly into the source code. Vote with your feet against this type of idiocy.
Well that settles it. I’m moving to another instance.
Yeah everyone else can see the sentence as it is. It’s just an instance thing.
I don’t understand. You are on lemmy.ml, which is an instance that does not display slurs in an effort to create a better social environment. It is totally automatic, and doesn’t involve an angry mod manually changing them, because if there really were to be a problem with your post, then the entire post/comment would simply be removed. If you disagree with this, then lemmy.ml isn’t for you, but don’t worry there are many other instances ou there.
You ever read a 1-star review on Amazon from someone who was clearly too stupid to know how to use the product? Like someone complaining that a USB-C charger doesn’t work because it doesn’t plug into their iphone?
That’s you. That’s the type of person you are.
Jesus Christ you’re late to the party. Ever had the perfect thing to say to someone a day too late, after they already left? That’s you. Read the comments, and get over yourself. Like Chandler without the laugh track.
Who put the “removed” there and what word was it before?
Taking a guess, your instance (not the authors) has the profanity filter mentioned in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 in effect. You can switch instances to avoid it. IIRC, it’s disabled by default now (and isn’t active on my instance).
Do you have a suggestion for a different instance? This will be my fourth one, sigh. I have one beehaw community I follow and some are vanned by the.
I picked my own carefully. Federates with the biggest instances, has downvotes, and no manual verification of signups.
At my high school, the administration banned the color and word “fuchsia” (kind of a purple-ish, pink-ish color).
For some reason, the senior class (year 12, the class one year above me at the time) had become obsessed with the color/word. They had taken to wearing fuchsia shirts with the word “fuchsia” on them. On a given day, you’d likely see a few dozen of these shirts roaming the halls with students inside them.
The ban came because, allegedly, somebody had made up a story about a Mexican hooker named “Fuchsia” (because that’s a Spanish name, right?) that was the supposed inspiration of the color craze.
So naturally, the admins banned the color and any mention of the word. Using the word “fuchsia” in any context, or wearing the color in any way was three days in in-school-suspension (during-the-day detention where you sat in a cubicle with literally nothing to do - you weren’t allowed to read, no schoolwork, or anything — just stare at the wall for 8 hours). Second offense was a week out of school suspension. Third meant you failed your year and had to repeat the grade.
So, the seniors started wearing other obscure colors with the name printed on the shirt. “Indigo” “Chartreuse” “Vermillion”. Every single one of these colored shirts had the name of the color, and the words “You can’t ban all the colors” underneath.
It was by far the dumbest ass rule I’d ever seen.
Haha this is amazing and ripe for suing the district for a freedom of speech violation. Surprised it didn’t happen but sounds like the kids were just way smarter than the admins in that case.
Schools are in loco parentis. Essentially they act as parents while children are at school. Children at school are not afforded all the same rights as normal citizens against the government. Like searches and seizures. School officials, in loco parentis, can approve for police to search a students belongings while the student is at school. Even if the student themselves tries to invoke their right to protection for unreasonable searches.
Same with speech, as parents can “ban” words in their homes. Schools can ban and restrict speech as in loco parentis.
That only goes so far with rulings like Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District and Safford Unified School District v. Redding
Certainly. And those are great citations. I’m really glad you posted them so I could read into it further.
While students don’t lose all rights and protections, the concurrent opinion on Tinker does say that they don’t have the full protection of the 1st.
I wish I could remember the specifics but my high school had an extremely ridiculous dress code policy at one point. Mostly targeting girls, of course, but also had weird shit like “no large/long coats.”
What I do remember perfectly though, is that a friend of mine and I, angrily pouring over the details of the stupid dress code, realized that capes were perfectly fine according to the code as written. So we both got huge capes and that was like a whole year of high school.
Was this in the 2000s? After the Columbine shooting, a lot of schools banned big trench coats and other long jackets because you could have hIdDeN wEaPoNs under them
That was what, twenty-five years ago almost? That’s a lot of people who have gone to school with that rule who weren’t alive when Columbine happened. It’s almost a shame we don’t post citations to why rules/regulations were added.
Ahh, yes, of course. Forgot about that. I graduated 2010 so that wasn’t really on my radar at the time.
Another favorite was “no flat billed hats”. I’m realizing now a lot of it had a very “we don’t want gangs. Well, all rappers are gangsters, let’s watch some hip hop music videos and just rule out everything they wear” vibe.
I always thought the no hats rule was really stupid. The teachers enforcing the rule was more distracting from the lesson than someone wearing a hat.
Security guard at the school was out to get me. To this day I have no idea why. He’d let my lowlife friends get away with murder.
Taking me to the dean for wearing a hat, he’s talking to another student, wearing a baseball hat. These guys were the same height, not like he missed it.
Security guards in schools are such a weird concept to me
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So after they stopped allowing hats, the assholes were so outsmarted that they resigned themselves to no longer causing any form of shit or harassment?
The elementary school I went to from kindergarten to second grade didn’t allow us to talk during lunch. It was called “chew time” when we had to stop talking.
A private school I used to go to banned Listerine breath strips, the ones you put on your tongue, because too many kids were using them.
Was this like a Monsters Inc. Academy or something?
I wish. I’d have liked it even more. Totally regular school just private. Only there for a few years before moving.
IIRC didn’t they have a small amount of alcohol or other chemical that kids would use too many of to purposely get drunk/high? Maybe I’m thinking of something else though
That’s true of mouthwash, but that seems impossible with breath strips. Like, both physically and financially impossible.
Forced to read and write about bible in public school, violating separation of church and state.
I mean, you can be forced to learn about the bible, even its contents, as part of a literature or history class in school.
But I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that probably wasn’t the purpose of what you were put through.
I’m not American, but in my country we straight up just had Religious Education classes as part of school. It sort of technically covered most of the major religions but really it was like 99% just about the bible and Christianity.
Also, it didn’t work lol
No jackets. My school was using a wing of a building under construction as additional classrooms and you had to take a bus from the main building. In the winter you could not wear or carry your jacket around prior to your class in this building, so you had to spend your passing time visiting your locker to pick up your jacket and hope you make it to the bus in time to not be late to your class. The school was not small so I was frequently late or didn’t wear a jacket.
Wow I can’t imagine… my school was so cold during the winter I wouldn’t have made it.
No shorts, even when it’s really hot and there’s no AC.
So some older boys started wearing skirts.
They changed the rule.
My school strictly prohibits vehicle use, and considers all violations a strong offense that is on a three-strikes out rule.
Yes, it includes e-scooters and swan boats.
Yes, it includes whether you are in uniform or not.
Yes, it includes whether you are in school or not.
Yes, even if you are licensed.
Yes, it is enforceable anywhere.
The rule is obnoxiously blanket.
wdym in school or not. How can they regulate what you do in your own time. surely that must be illegal
It is illegal but so far nobody wants to raise an issue with it because it’s a school that has a lot of govt officials, diplomats, expats, and businessmen sending their kids there. No one wants to risk stinking their own reputation by raising an issue.
As for “how”, apparently if someone accidentally snaps a picture of those kids riding things they shouldn’t be, anytime, and a school disciplinary officer sees it, anywhere, he can give out the warning. Has done so a few times actually.
The rationale of the rule is that vehicle operation is something not befitting the image of a student, especially a student at this (supposedly) prestigious school.
Suffice to say the damn rule made me apprehensive of riding in a friend’s car for a while, and of the idea of getting my own license when I became of age.
When I decided to ask the school about the apprppriateness and legality of the rule (as an alumnus), they said “we are disappointed in you. You were a great student. We did not expect you to become someone who tries to force us to change our ways of life.” That said, unless you grow up to become a nationalist or a right-winger, you are a disappointment to them, so maybe even without this vehicle use thing I’m still a disppointment to them anyway.
This story sounds absurd but yes it is supposed to be this absurd.
I still pass by this school many times as it’s on my way to work. I wish I could tell those kids and new parents who might not be aware of “the system” something they should know …
https://www.hellowoodlands.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/IMG_3037-660x400.jpg
Swan boats? Like that?!? At a school? Lol
As the rule is blanket, you can ride one maybe in your school uniform but on a Saturday (maybe after you’re done with cram school – some crams ask you to wear your uniform because it’s how they improve their reputation by recording live sessions with students from many good schools). If that happens and the disciplinary officer knows, you’re given a strike.
If it’s all-inclusive then it’s not that bad. Rather a great idea for schools, actually.
How the fuck would a blanket ban of VEHICLES be a great idea?? Follow up: which culture do you live in that apparently hates transport and also, what have you been smoking?
This is the most American shit I’ve read.
What’s the worst that a vehicle ban could do, make you walk? What’s so wrong with sacrificing convenient mobility for 0.005 square miles in exchange of even a marginally cleaner and safer environment?
A bicycle is a vehicle too. What’s wrong with biking?
We lost five days due to a hurricane. Rather than adding 5 days to the end of the school year, they added 20 minutes to the end of every day or 5 mins to the end of every class.
They did that to us in 2011 - added 15 minutes to our work day to make up for several snow days. 12 years later we’re still working those extra 15 fucking minutes!
Virginia Beach?
Texas. 2011 super bowl ice storm.
Ah. I ask because apparently my district did it again after I graduated. Learned about it from a random user on Reddit.
Not sure if it was a rule since I think it was temporary but putting a whole year level in detention because a few students from that year level broke the rule, that really passed me off even though my year level wasn’t being punished for anything
This school didn’t care about students at all with teachers stereotyping and playing favouritism
ah yes, the blanket blame everyone ‘solution’. why bother putting in the effort to get down to the root of the problem when punishing everyone is that much easier!
gender-based dress codes, especially haircuts and earrings. WGAF.
