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.
They do. It's called lunch detention. This girl's beef is that she got sent to lunch detention for causing trouble in the lunchroom by not following rules.
Yeah I agree. The other side is... all she had to do was eat the lunch detention like she was told to... not tell her folks anything... and then behave in school. She's playing the system because she knows daddy is a jerk who will argue for whatever her little heart desires.
Not yet, but with Dad industriously teaching her how to flaunt authority, she might grow up to be Che Guevara.
I have a friend who told me that daddy's little girls grow up to be bigtime b!tches. Now I know why.
Instead of asking for permission to move to a different seat, or starting friendships with students near her regular seat, daddy's little girl will be taught to be a spoiled brat who demands special treatment.
Understood. However, my comment had to do with establishing a fair policy rather than a over reacting to a large number of kids and imagined problems of the school. An out of hand lunch room is a result of poor supervision and discipline.
Children need discipline, but not an environment in which they are practically tied down every minute of the day.
What a cutie.
the school DOES have dicipline problems.....that's why this is done.
That sounds like exactly what happened.
It is a stupid rule, but this girl needs to learn there are proper procedures for civilized people to address their grievences - Civil disobedience, glorified by the communist M.L.King - is to reserved a s last resort after all other options have been approached.
That is how we do things in what is supposed to be our representative republic - we are NOT a democracy for mob rule or anarchy.
She needs suspension the next time and her father can go to jail for encouraging truancy .
I'm glad I am no longer a professional teacher.
We won't entrust the State with educating our kids.
I think that if we start telling teachers that they can't assign seats in the classroom and in the lunchroom, and expect the kids to sit in them like they are told... then we have lost the war.
Last year, my wife taught at a school where the principal was scared to death of the parents. Anytime a parent complained about anything, the principal automatically believed the parent and never considered the teacher's point of view.
He often went so far as to remove a teacher if the parents complained.
The results were predictable. Anytime a strict or hard teacher attempted to challenge the class with difficult work, or to impose any sort of discipline, the students would whine to the parents, who would whine to the principal, who would remove the teacher--either by reassigning to another grade or outright dismissal.
The students were very keen to this, and openly taunted teachers, saying they could get them fired anytime they wanted, just by complaining to their parents. The teachers were basketcases, never knowing from day-to-day if they were going to lose their job over a complaint by some 12 year-old.
My wife, who is a strict and excellent teacher in every way, got out of that madhouse by the end of the semester.
Well, the school could always drug the kids into submission.
I believe the schools have begun doing that so they don't get sued by another idiot parent for something his/her child did while not under direct supervision!
How old are you?
Exactly! I am so tired of hearing restriction after restriction being placed in my 6th grade daughter's school due to the actions of just a few. The kids are not allowed to sit with their friends at lunch, are not allowed to even go to the bathroom or to band class without supervision of an adult.
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