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.
Did you have assigned seats for lunch in the cafeteria? Of course, we had assigned seats in the classroom. that's not unusual. I think assigned seats for lunch is excessive.
One nice thing about assigned seats is that no one gets left out...
I was referring to the assigned seating at lunch, as a blanket punishment for all the kids, just because they might have had a few kids act up in the past.
You assume way too much. I will back teachers 100% on legitimate discipline issues. This discussion is about an idiotic policy.
Exactly right. See post #120.
Sitting in an assigned seat is hardly "punishment." It is an efficient and reasonable attempt to impose discipline.
My parent's oldest will be 13 this year. He's on arthritis medication. However, he still does his best "wiggle, bend, wiggle, bend, slurp, drool, slurp" everytime he sees someone.
The problem, as I see it, is not that she is being punished, but being punished for having "broken" the rule for three weeks before these gestapo "discovered" that she had been out of her assigned seat. As a lawyer, this is not three times. It's either 21 times (three weeks out of her seat) or 1 time (you just got caught "breaking the rule")
I mean, these are TRULY IRS TACTICS:
WHAT? YOU HAVEN"T PAID TAXES THIS YEAR? OR THE PAST THREE YEARS?
Ignore the fact that they missed this for three weeks, though it's their job to make sure the little kiddies obey.
"This does not give my son the liberty to mouth off back at the teacher."
Bless you. You are undoubtedly raising a fine young man. First off, he hung in where others bailed out. Second, you taught him the lesson he needed to learn. Too bad more aren't like you. Enjoy watching your son turn into something special.
Sorry Mr. LoPresti, but you are wrong. It is a prison.
While I happen to agree with LoPresti on principle, I'm against getting the ACLU involved.
What he should do is get a solid school board slate going and change the rules that way. That would be more constructive, and more painful to the ninnies.
I agree with you, and I also had assigned seating in grammar school.
Actually God teaches that it is good to teach children obedience and respect. In fact, the ten commandments require it and the teachers are representatives of the parents. Besides being against the laws of God, if you let your children think you will support them in their disobedience you are asking for big trouble, way beyond a slight inconvenience of sitting where they want.
You are a great mom and a blessing to your son.
It is much easier to deal with the administration when your child did everything right. You then have something to work with.
When I was in college, I worked in the Teen Dept. of the local YMCA. I had to ride herd on these kids every day. On a Friday or Saturday night, we might have a few hundred kids in the facility. And these weren't all Eagle Scouts, either. Many of these kids were from broken homes and literally had nowhere else to go. They were given memberships for free, or for a nominal fee. What I learned was, the key to maintaining control is to have a simple, clearly spelled-out set of rules, and rigidly enforce them. Discipline problems aren't solved by adding more and more rules.
Part of the solution for public schools may be to make it easier for them to expel problem students.
I'll choose freedom.
Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one. (Thomas Jefferson)
And maybe it's just because they find that it helps them keep order.
My mother used to teach elementary and then got shifted to middle school kids. Those kids are worse than high schoolers. Mouths on them like convicts and attitudes to go with them.
After hearing a few choice stories that involved my mother I made a habit of stopping by the school to see her on occasion when I was headed out for a ride in full leathers.
The reality of the fact that I could never and would never do anything to them didn't matter. It was what they perceived the situation to be. They thought that if they acted up to my mother that there was a chance that I might come looking for them. She has since not had much in the way of discipline problems. The same cannot be said for her fellow teachers.
If this brat gets away with doing whatever she wants despite knowing the rules then she'll continue to do it the rest of the way through school. If she had a problem then she should have seen what she could do about getting things changed BEFORE she got in trouble. After the fact is revisionist BS.
Kids have to have limits, they also have to be taught the right and wrong way to do things. This brat will get out of school and wonder why she keeps getting fired from jobs for just doing what she wants. Either that or she'll wind up some dem scumbags mistress. Regardless it won't be pretty.
The father will create a child who has no respect for authority and a child who believes that rules don't apply to her. After teaching the child that her father will support her when she is defiant to authority, the child loses all respect for both the adults she is rebelling against AND most importantly she loses respect for her father who has demonstrated to her he will not provide clear boundaries.
That's a pretty good age for a Boxer. It's funny how they never change. All other dogs actually grow up, but Boxers remain puppies their whole lives.
I bet he has gray all over his head and face. Old gray Boxers are noble and adorable (and easier to catch if they run out the front door).
Mine tested positive for heart worms and stayed at the vet for three days last week. He didn't care for that at all, and he was a little slower for a few days. He's back to his old self, now.
Oooh, I hadn't even considered that angle.
Failure to teach children the difference between true, objective right & wrong (from God) and the fallible man-made version borders on child abuse. Those who say "rules are rules" without regard to the legitimacy of those rules wallow in moral relativism, without even knowing it.
Do you have any idea how many kids are diagnosed with behavioral problems these days or how disruptive even one middle school brat deciding to do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants can be?
Three teachers trying to keep an eye on over 200 kids. That's the average lunch period where my mother works.
You try to keep an eye on 200 kids at a time when it takes two of them to get an ugly situation under control and then get back to me about legitimate discipline issues.
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