Posted on 05/20/2004 10:50:06 AM PDT by Puppage
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- Twelve-year-old Gianna LoPresti wants to sit with her friends in the cafeteria. But she may need a permission slip -- from a judge, that is.
At Galloway Township Middle School, students must sit in the seats they're assigned to during lunch hour. The girl, a seventh-grader, has been cited three times for violating the policy.
Now, her father is suing the school, saying the rule violates First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
"These are kids," said Giovanni LoPresti, 40. "It's not a prison."
School officials say the restrictions are aimed at keeping order in a lunchroom buzzing with 260 seventh- and eighth graders.
The dispute began two weeks ago when the girl returned home from school and told her father she'd been given detention.
"I thought she'd done something drastic," said her father. "I said `You had to have done something.' She said she sat with her friends and socialized at lunch."
The girl was found sitting in a seat she had not been assigned to and was given three detentions -- one for each week she had done it. Lunchtime detention consists of eating lunch in a classroom, under a teacher's supervision, away from the cafeteria.
LoPresti says the restriction is unfair because it assumes all students are potential troublemakers.
The girl, who has been punished previously for talking in class and once throwing a calculator onto a desk, is no troublemaker, according to her father.
On Monday, he filed suit in Superior Court seeking an injunction barring the school district from enforcing the policy.
School officials say the seating restriction has been in place for years and that parents are advised of it through student handbooks sent home at the start of the school year.
"The students are allowed to move around the cafeteria," said Schools Superintendent Doug Groff. "All they have to do is ask permission from teachers or the principal. It's not that they're restricted. It's just decorum."
Typically, the cafeteria has up to 260 students in it during lunch periods, he said.
"Normally, parents understand that we need some rules in schools. They expect that and they have an expectation. If you let kids wander wherever they wanted, the parents would say 'What kind of school are you running? You let the kids run wherever they want,"' Groff said.
Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's New Jersey chapter, would not comment on the legal merits of the girl's case.
She said free speech has restrictions as to time, manner and place, but that enforcing assigned seating in a school cafeteria was unusual.
"It sounds like an excessive restriction. I'm not aware of other schools with 260 kids who have resorted to this. This sounds overreaching to me," she said.
Typically, school principals -- not school boards -- make such policies for their buildings, according to Michael Yaple, spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.
"Our sense is that it's not uncommon to have assigned tables or rules saying students can't roam about the cafeteria. The courts have typically given wide latitude to school administrators to maintain order and discipline," Yaple said.
Frank Askin, director of the Constitutional Law Clinic at Rutgers University's Newark campus, questioned whether LoPresti has a legitimate First Amendment claim.
"I certainly wouldn't want to take his case," said Askin.
In fact, no one has. LoPresti is acting as his own attorney.
Though she hasn't served the lunchtime detentions yet, his daughter said it's wrong for the school to tell her where to sit.
"I think the school thinks the students are going to cause trouble at lunch. It's wrong to punish the kids who do nothing. We need to talk to our friends during lunch," Gianna LoPresti said.
I was responding to the attitude of, "Whatever the rules are, they must be followed, no questions."
And not following the rules is the way of anarchy and liberals.
Since I doubt YOUR kids go to this school, what entitles you to have an opinion?
I'll comment as I please, thankyouverymuch.
Since your kids attend private schools (as do mine) I have no choice but to assume that you have no idea what hell holes many public schools have become.
Assigning seats at lunch is a reasonable practice, hardly worth the "Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Tyndale burn-me-at-the-stake-for-standing-up-against-fascism-and-for-freedom" perspective.
It isn't asking much for the little darlings to sit in an assigned seat for a 30 minute lunch break.
"That's it, try to extrapolate rules for schoolchildren into something society wide.
That's not blowing things out of proportion or being dramatic or anything like that."
Well said. In fact, that IS the problem here. And I'm sure the little darling's daddy has a similar view of this as Bella does. Even though little darling has been a discipline problem in the past.
Time for a new tagline.
What we don't know is the reasoning behind the rule. For example, have they had problems with fist fights, food fights, or other disruptive behavior in the lunchroom? Are there gangs at this school with the gangmembers congregating at lunch time? Rules like this are usually a result of past transgressions. I was in charge of 25 preteen boys last summer and by the end of it I was a fascist. It was like being in charge of a monkey cage at the zoo. Any thing that could be picked up would be used to whack someone else, and if it was light enough, flung at someone. Anyone with problems at home would come in and take it out on anyone smaller than them. I couldn't imagine riding herd on 260 of them, especially ones with whiney litigious parents.
What entitles me to have an opinion is having a mother who teaches at a public school who is forever being hampered at attempts to discipline by the likes of you.
I totally agree with your reasoning. There is a right way and a wrong way to deal with situations.
For example, my son plays trumpet and loves it. This year, new teacher, a real jerk, literally. I'm not the only parent or student that realizes he's a bit lacking in the common decency arena. Many students have dropped band this year and the school staff realizes this teacher is the reason.
My son came home with a slip for being obnoxious at a concert competition. His defense - he's put up with this guy all year and he's tired of listening to him. I understand and hear what he's saying, BUT, he broke the rules. He pays the consequences. I have already talked to the school about the teacher many times, there is nothing they can do due to contracts. This does not give my son the liberty to mouth off back at the teacher.
You have a problem with questioning rules?
You must have a limit. But then again, it's helpful for any government to have a bunch of sheep running around. Easier to corral them that way.
And similarly, school administrators are not God Almighty.
Ok, I count you as a problem. And that's the double edge sword of freedom. One is free, but so are the fools.
Once again I applaude your attempt to take a very narrow situation and broaden it to encompass the whole of society.
Bravo, your ability to blow things out of proportion with respect to this issue is nothing short of monumental and deserves unlimited recognition.
Does he do the classic Boxer "bend in half" routine, when he's really happy to see you?
No, I have a problem with people that support blanket punishment and blindly following any rule thrown their way.
That's because you went to school before this country turned into a bunch of sniveling whiners who think everything they WANT is automatically a RIGHT. It got this way because as a society, we've gotten to the point that almost any individual or miniscule splinter group just has to do a bit of whining in order to get their way. The country is now effectively run by such people.
MM
I don't believe in punishing the many for the crimes of the few. But hey, that's just me.
Oh, yeah. Everytime. He bends himself into a "U" shape, wags that little nub of a tail so fast it's a brown blur, and walks sideways towards me with his tongue flapping in all directions.
You gotta love 'em. That's a great way to be greeted at the end of a long day.
She did it THREE TIMES and was finally punished after the third. How the hell is that blanket punishment?
The rules aren't in place for the kids. Its there for the teachers so they can sit on their fat lazy asses. They want to be babysitters, not teachers. Why, a kid might do something wrong and then the "teachers" would have to DO something about it, like correction.
Hell just shackle them and go have a cig.
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