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.
We never had assigned seating at lunch, and I never heard anyone object like this.
Anyhow, let's extrapolate this educrat's idea...
'If you let kids citizens wander wherever they wanted, the parents U.N. would say 'What kind of school country are you running? You let the kids citizens run wherever they want,"'
Quite frankly, I like this girl's attitude. In all my years attending and teaching in public schools I never saw schools assign lunch seats. At most, in elementary school, we had to sit according to the way we had lined up.
It's not that we had better behaved kids, but rather that we had more supervision and that kids who acted badly ended up having to clean tables and floors.
Sometimes schools need to have their rules challenged and in my opinion this one needs it. Schools have been increasingly restricting the amount of time kids have for interacting with each other outside the direct control of adults. Unless there are some really strange circumstances that the school hasn't told us, I'd say they need to loosen the chains.
There was a thread earlier about a kid that was suspended for a small bat. I wonder if the two are related? Maybe one of the reasons common sense has died in a wave of zero tolerance is because the school boards are in fear of being sued by stupid parents.
Get a life, Giovanni.
Sloth,
I agree with you. I spent a year observing elementary schools in Taiwan. They give their students a great deal of "free time" during which kids can roam and play on campus with very little adult supervision. It reminded me of my own elementary school.
Gee, it's a good thing you aren't given to hyperbole.
While I think the rule is a little silly, it appears the school allows socializing. My (uneducated) guess is that the girl just kept roaming around without asking for permission. This is much different than the case the father is making.
Circular reasoning. That's like saying it's impossible for a gun ban to affect law-abiding people, since anyone with a gun in violation of the ban is by definition a criminal.
The NEA does it's damage for sure. But not all of the decline of the public school system is due to the NEA. Idiot parents who undermine discipline in schools must share some of the responsibility.
Imbecile.
Teachers don't want to have to spend their lunch break being teachers. They want the kids to act as civilized as they are. Strict rules in the lunchroom and life is easier for the teachers.
I guess nobody ever told her she could feel free to make friends with those she was seated by. Oh no, that would be totall uncool. Fer sure.
So the teachers are also assigned seats and prevented from moving about without permission?
"Circular reasoning"
The circle can be traversed in either direction. Restricting activity at a school lunch stifles the student's independance, affecting their creativity, and ultimately leading to a generation of pathetic zombie-like drones. So, never restrict any child from doing anything.
Call it a pre-emptive strike.
Though we can all see why the school established the policy of assigned seating, it seems to remind me of completely unfair and unnecessary laws that restrict everyone of liberties when attention should only be given to a few.
Take the kids who are causing trouble in the lunchroom and discipline them. Lazyness on a part of the school to supervise these kids is no excuse to submit them to a gulag-like environment.
Cute kid. Too bad she has a sniveling lunatic for a dad.
The bottom lin is this... if they did it the exact way it was done when you were a kid.... and someone's kid had to clean the table and the floor, the school would end up getting sued because at least one parent would object to that, and sue because of it.
I'm not saying that the NEA and all that are functioning the way they should, but I am saying that 90 percent of what's wrong with schools today can be traced back to parents.
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