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.
Just this morning on the news, there was a report that the city of Seattle has to put up a fence along a railroad track to keep people walking on the tracks because the fools are actually GETTING RUN OVER BY TRAINS!!!! Wow!!! Go figure.
$75,000 tax payer money. The city says it decided to do the fence because the LAW SUITS were costing more. People walk on the tracks, get killed by a train and the family SUES the city for not putting a fence up to keep these STUPID DEMOCRATIC VOTERS from walking on the damned train tracks!!! And these fools actually win and get money for their stupid family members hit by a train. Like a train can GO AROUND THEM OR SOMETHING!!!
One interview was with a girl crying, yelling, screaming how her best friend was killed by that mean old train while WALKING ON THE TRACKS!!! What a wonderful, great, smart, going places she was going to be. Now her life is cut short by this horrible train. Mean ole train. What this girl forgot to add was that her friend, along with all these smarts, was incredibly stupid for walking on a train tracks. Like, couldn't you hear the damned train coming or did you simply expect the train to stop for you?
This country has lost it. It has actually lost all perspective on being anything, closely related, to being normal.
Authority needs to earn respect.
So this whiner doesn't like the idea of controlling chaos. Any bets who HE will be voting for in November?
You overlooked what else I said: discipline problems are not solved by creating more and more rules. This idiotic lunchroom policy falls into this category.
"School officials say the restrictions are aimed at keeping order in a lunchroom buzzing with 260 seventh- and eighth graders."
I don't recall where the school said that they were using it as punishment. I do however consider it a wise strategy to keep trouble makers apart.
I shudder to think what these folks would say about a rule in a grammer school I went to. There was a line painted down the hallway and we "shudder" had to walk on the right side only. If we crossed the line we would have to stay after. And if we were exiting as a class, we had to form a line.
Now that I think about it, these tyrants in my old school should be shot.
Last year we had nest of ground hornets in the front yard. One would get in the house from time to time, and, being a Boxer, he just couldn't leave well enough alone.
One day a ground hornet was in the window, buzzing around trying to fly through the glass. He stuck his face against the window, and quickly put the hornet in his mouth, and spit it back out. He did it so fast, I know he had to have been stung before. He normally would not have spit out any critter.
He did this 8-10 times: hornet in mouth, hornet spit out, hornet in mouth, hornet spit out......
Finally, the hornet, who was walking around like he was drunk, had had enough. hornet in mouth......ROWRROROROR!
Django spit him out and shook his head, put his paws to his lips, then went outside, rubbing his right cheek against the ground for about 10 minutes. I know it was cruel, but I laughed myself silly while he walked with his right cheek rubbing the ground.
His swelled up, and I gave him a Benadryl, which fixed him right up.
What a doofus.
Freedom of Speech? ROTFLMAO!!!!! This is a school. It requires order like all other large institutions. If they change the policy they are basically saying your kids can do whatever they want. If it was my kids and this happened, I'd be calling this idiot and tell him to keep his trap shut because if they change the policy i will have to pay for my kids to go to another school where children learn things like RULES!
Now I have to argue the other side of this.
I coached football for four years. Coached 14-15 years olds. Granted this is easier than teaching since they all want to be there.
When my unit messed up, we all did pushups, ran, etc. In conditioning, the whole line ran. We win and lose as a team. The whole team gets the touchdown scored on them.
Peer pressure gets the whole team not to make mental errors like jumping offsides, etc.
And it earns it by establishing clear cut expectations and clear cut consequences.
Males generally get to 65-75 lbs., sometimes pushing 90 lbs, but that's rare. Females about 10 lbs. less. Mine is a little under 70 lbs.
You have to remember that Boxers have virtually no body fat, it's all muscle so they are much stronger than their weight would seem to indicate.
We also have a Boston Terrier, and they get along great.
Good point. They make me sit where they want me to at work. I can see me telling my boss he is infringing on my freedom of speech. That would elicit an interesting response.
The reality is that we don't know for a fact that this was put in place to reduce discipline problems as much as it may be in place just to maintain order.
>>Now that I think about it, these tyrants in my old school should be shot.<<
LOL!
Mine too!
It kills me how many people are defending the child who did not follow the rules but will wail to high heaven about how the schools are failing our kids.
Out of a class of 48 kids to one nun, 2 of us did not graduate from college. One got married and has 10 kids and one started his own VERY sucessful Balloon Business. A little discipline is not a bad thing.
That's a distinction without a difference.
>>Good point. They make me sit where they want me to at work. I can see me telling my boss he is infringing on my freedom of speech. That would elicit an interesting response.<<
Amen! And it is not my job to make my children everlasting children, but fine adults. There is a way to do things and a way not to.
"What I learned was, the key to maintaining control is to have a simple, clearly spelled-out set of rules, and rigidly enforce them."
Not according to you.
As well it should be.
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.