Posted on 06/26/2012 2:46:20 PM PDT by metmom
More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?
The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".
"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police."
The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.
Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Good heavens!
I’m so happy that all of my grandkids but 1 are in private schools.
Welcome to Amerika! What happened to Texas? I thought that they were freedom loving, gun toting dudes that didn’t put up with this kind of stuff.
The US has gone crazy and it’s not hard to see the cycle, single mothers (and divorced mothers) can’t handle the discipline so their kids are out of control, feminized schools that don’t know how to control kids any more, a legal system that has tied the hands of non-cop citizens in disciplining kids, out of control cops looking for any excuse to justify their existence, zero tolerance on just about anything and an industrial prison complex that profits off imprisoning large numbers of people. We are turning fascist far faster than I could have ever imagined.
Check the Texas Education Code.....
http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/ED/htm/ED.37.htm
For what it’s worth and I don’t know how accurate the ticket assertion is.
Excerpt from a Texas Committee hearing this past March.
snip
Although we know that school ticketing is a major contributor to the high number of
youths involved in the juvenile justice system, we need better data to understand and
combat the problem. More than 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to juveniles in
Texas each year.1 These Class C misdemeanor tickets require court appearances for
students and are often a youth’s first interaction with the juvenile justice system. As
detailed in a 2011 report by Texas Appleseed, the vast majority of tickets issued each
year are for infractions that are school-related, such as disruption of class. However,
school-based police units are not required to report data on incidents of student
ticketing, arrests, or use of restraints. We cannot, therefore, know precisely how wide
spread the school-to-prison pipeline is, which schools are over-relying on ticketing to
address misbehavior, or whether police are acting responsibly when dealing with
children.2 The lack of data is a serious obstacle for youth advocates seeking ways to
reduce referrals to the criminal justice system.
end snip
When will they be getting SWAT teams?
Nothing is more fun to me than seeing the reaction of parents when their kids’ lives are RUINED, simply because they sent those kids to public schools.
The parents all act SHOCKED, but they all knew the chance they were taking, at least here in Texas (where this article was written), as just about EVERYONE knows the risks of sending kids to public schools. That’s why HUGE NUMBERS of us homeschool or send our kids to private schools (even if our crappy governor won’t help pay for it).
For other states...they’ll just have to ‘keep learning’, but for Texas, anyone who sends their kids to our public schools might as well play Russian Roulette on them.
What a circle jerk... these people are insane...
The Police, Teachers, and Givernment Workers are Unionized and are like PIRATES...
** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8tHwqvnQtQ
Not have your neighbor pay for it.
It would be a lot cheaper once unions are no longer involved.
“I live is Texas also and I’ve never heard of any of this. Something does not sound right. Kids arrested everyday at school and having to appear in court does not sound like something we would put up with to any extent whatsoever.”
Yea, if it’s your kid and they’ll get off with a warning, providing you keep silent - you’ll keep silent. Standard Operating Procedure here, these days.
“Unfortunately a fair percentage of even quite young ‘children’ age 8/9 have grasped that parental threats are hollow as a result of child empowerment via ‘child abuse’ laws. The result is that many parents are greeted by open angry defiance about any sort of discipline or even attempts to enforce rules in the home.”
That is true. In my case, I did two things to deal with it. First, my kids never went to a public school (I’m not that stupid), and second I made it VERY CLEAR to them that if they EVER discussed discipline in our house or anything else that might make a Generation-X female social worker mad at us, that junior would quickly get a new set of parents. In other words, I practically dared them to turn us in. Needless to say, they were perfectly happy to get a light spanking once in a while when they acted up.
And that’s the problem - children are trained to tell the truth to authority figures. That is a HUGE MISTAKE. The only persons that I EVER wanted my kids to be truthful with were me and my wife - everyone else, including grandparents, can go to hell - as some things stay in the family. If more parents explained that, then less of them would lose their kids to some over-hormoned social worker, with a chip on her shoulder.
Why would anyone willingly send their child into an environment that poses a "danger to the teachers or the other students"? Huh?
I pity the children whose parents can not ransom them through homeschooling or private schooling. And..In many counties there are no private schools. The price-fixing government school cartel has created such a hostile environment for private schooling that all privates schools are now out of business.
Why do we expect children to put up with a hostile environment that would win an adult millions if it happened on the job? And...Then we play with the kids minds by telling them that, "These are the best years of your life!", or " Leaning to punch out a bully is good for you."
Many children are hopelessly abandoned to these Lord of the Flies environments by their parents and the entire community. How awful!
Bipolar is treatable these days
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The drugs used to treat it often cause massive and rapid weight gain.
What extra taxes?
It’s a risk all right and it’s not worth it. There are plenty of horror stories about the use of “cops in school” (and zero tolerance, especially in Texas) which, if I remember correctly, was implemented under the Clinton administration. Remember the jerk judge who sentenced an honor student to jail for truancy a couple of weeks ago?
Instead of just glibly sending their kids off to the local public school, parents should at least read the school handbook and really ask questions and do some research (then maybe retain a lawyer if they’re going to send them anyway?). Then they can make an informed decision. I imagine more parents would just say “no thanks” if they they knew that their kid could possibly be one step away from being criminally prosecuted for chewing gum or being in possession of an aspirin .
Thanks for posting!
What’s really sad is, a large % here are oblivious to the point of the article.
It was a nice country once. It really was.
“It’s a risk all right and it’s not worth it. There are plenty of horror stories about the use of “cops in school” (and zero tolerance, especially in Texas) which, if I remember correctly, was implemented under the Clinton administration. Remember the jerk judge who sentenced an honor student to jail for truancy a couple of weeks ago?”
Yep - that sure is Texas today. What (white) parents don’t understand is that school is simple a HOSTILE PLACE for their kids. The objective of the teachers and administrators, ALMOST TO THE PERSON, is to ‘equalize’ results. Achievement is meant with scorn. Opportunities to take an ‘advantaged’ child down a few notches with a criminal record is simply too tempting to turn down.
Today’s schools, at least in Governor Perry’s Texas.
There’s been stuff on the market without that side effect for a good 5 years.
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