From the Houston Chronicle: "Shelby Sendelbach, a sixth-grader in the Katy Independent School District, was read her rights, ticketed and punished with a mandatory four-month assignment to an alternative school because she wrote "I love Alex" on a gymnasium wall with a baby blue Sharpie. See the rest of the story.
I have run into this in another school district in Texas myself. The school administrators seem to walk around with a rule book in one hand. Half-a-dozen times in the last 5 years, I have come face-to-face with a principal whose answer was "we're following the rules." If the rules don't make any sense in the situation, well, that's okay. It's as if they're saying, "You don't pay me enough to think."
Two of my children have been "sentenced" to these alternative campuses. I say "sentenced" because once I felt the teachers were wrong and withdrew my daughter from school. The principal told me that he didn't think I could do that. My reply was, "This is Texas. Hide and watch!" He then informed me that if I tried to enroll her in any public school in the state, she would have to "serve her time" in an alternative campus.
The alternative campuses are not the problem. In fact, where I live, the place they sent the kids was better than the schools they came from in terms of discipline and ability to do their work without interference from other students.
I have run into the "if X then Y, with no deviation under any circumstances" mentality so often that I have beseeched my daughter to finish school quickly, quietly, and without causing any further need for the teachers at her school to think about her. In other words, I have told her to become invisible, because I am not a quiet, pleasant, tolerant, tactful mom, and I have been known to make more trouble for my children by telling their teachers where to go and how to get there.
This kind of algorithmic discipline is fairly common in Texas. I wonder if it is like this in other states. Is it?
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Comments: 10
The mom panicked and called the police. A police officer showed up,
and interviewed the kids seperately. Both told the same story: the girl suggested the whole thing to the boy. The officer arrested and cuffed the boy, took him to the station where a judge required him to undergo couseling. Nothing was required of the girl who instigated the whole thing. What should have happened is the mom should have told the kids to put their clothes back on and come to the kitchen for milk and cookies and then later had an educational discussion with her daughter.
I agree with your assessment of the "Have Rulebook, Will Punish" School Principal. Especially at such early ages, the thinking behind such rules should be about teaching kids lessons about how to be part of society, not about the punishment, per se. But then, as you say, actual thinking would be required.
Given that you have two kids in your local schools -- and, thus, tons of free time, I'm sure ÷^) -- I would encourage you to run for a seat on the school board or embarrass your school board members in letters to local newspaper editors in order to educate the educators about how small children SHOULD be treated.
Sorry to hear that other schools aren't like ours! Maybe that's why we are 'School to Watch'!