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.
Suppose you have a cafeteria with 200 kids and no assigned seating. Everyone gets to sit with their friends. 10 kids misbehave on a regular basis. Rather than punishing the 10, the school changes the policy to assigned seating at lunch. Now, 190 kids who weren't doing anything wrong are now no longer able to sit with their friends during lunch.
I find that neither efficient nor reasonable.
Been there, done that. See my #133.
I have no problem with it. It is a classic form of discipline, using peer pressure to enforce the rules.
My teachers and coaches used it often. I turned out just fine.
The only problem with this whole situation is the whiney dad who insists the rules are not for his little angel.
Have you been to a school cafeteria lately?
We don't know the backround on why this rule was put in place but we do know that this child was not following the rules three times and was punished.
As I said, if the child followed the rules and the parent fought at that point, I would have no problem. Instead another lawsuit because a child did not follow the rules and daddy doesn't like it. Our taxes go up in lawyers fees and the NEA screams they need more money.
Children act only the way we expect them to. If we expect them to follow the rules (even the stupid ones) and work to change them, they will act that way.
It is next to impossible to expel problem kids from schools. The troublemakers usually claim some kind of mental illness, ADD or slight mental retardation, which obligates the school to keep them or face civil rights violations. We had this problem at my little brother's school. A kid on the bus was beating the hell out of the other kids every day, but the school officials claimed they couldn't do anything because it would violate his civil rights since he had been diagnosed with a disorder of some kind. As for my 25 charges, I was universally hated for my clearly spelled out rules and rigidly enforced discipline. lol. They all agreed, however, that they knew where they stood with me.
Don't bother calling the other reverend, Al Sharpton! I hear he's working overtime at Denny's to pay back the U.S. Taxpayers that $100,000 in matching funds he fraudulently acquired!
Poor baby! I'm glad he's doing better.
Yeah, he is all gray and white. And he still acts like a puppy. He's always been the funniest Boxer though. He has this thing about flowers and loves to go spend all day lying in my parents flower beds. He's terribly allergic and has to take Benadryl. That doesn't stop him though; the minute he gets outside he heads for the flowers. He's a sweetie.
>>Ignore the fact that they missed this for three weeks, though it's their job to make sure the little kiddies obey.
In my daughter's school, there were two warnings in writing and then a punishment. She wasn't ignored, she was given due process.
Will the father sue the school again when his poor baby is burdened with too much homework?
That's fine, if you do it for a week. It loses its effectiveness as a strategy if you make it a permanent policy.
Tell me, if y'all might, do Boxers get huge? We're looking for a companion for the Dread Boston Salty, who's 27 pounds of sheer terrier mayhem, and we need something that's too large as a puppy for him to eat, and that's too small as a grown-up to eat him.
Isn't easier and better to just punish the kids making the problems though? Or would you rather teach the kids that they get to pay for the mistakes of others?
If you read that far in my post, you definitely read the part wherein I question the utility of assigned lunch seating.
>>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. <<
You are very wise. (and a blessing to your mom!)
"What I learned was, the key to maintaining control is to have a simple, clearly spelled-out set of rules, and rigidly enforce them."
Which is exactly what this school was doing. Don't blame me, they're your words.
LOL. When I started that job, there was another guy who was hired the same time as me. He was much laxer with the kids than I was, so for the longest time I'd hear "but Jerry let's us do this". He was the good guy, and I was the bad guy. Then, management cracked down on him because he wasn't keeping things under control, and he had to get tough. All of a sudden, I was the good guy, and he was the bad guy. Consistency is important; they knew all along what to expect from me.
"I'll choose freedom."
Uh... a little slow on the uptake are ya? I didn't suggest that either of us not choose freedom. Simply meant that I'd have to suffer fools.
"Loser pays" sounds more and more palatable right about now...
As for who sets the limits, apparently the rule was established by the school through its normal process. In short, this means the local society established it. This isn't some arbitrary rule leveled in an arbitrary way.
I teach my children that they must follow the rules. In fact we go over the rules sent home very carefully one by one when the enter a new school. We have even objected at the outset that some rules were either too stupid to agree to or requested clarification. The result has normally been a rewritten rule or an acceptance by the school that we will be exempted. If they want to change them, fine. Follow them until the change is made.
I had one child break a rule that I myself would have been guilty of. There was wet cement and he wrote his name in it. He was suspended for 3 days for damaging property. I did all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing when I was called to principals office. He broke the rule and he paid the price and I supported the punishment. Ten years latter his name is still there and he still thinks the punishment was worth it and that he deserved it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.