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.
One big problem is schools have turned into some kind of social event --- kids aren't going to learn, they're going to be cool, make friends, go to dances. I think we should maybe consider dumping schools as they're known and replace them with learning centers which would have no social function -- strictly for learning.
Schools must do a lot better on discipline
http://www.borderlandnews.com/stories/opinion/columnists/20040520-120436.shtml
This is an interesting editorial ---- in one school discipline cut the class size by 40% That's almost half the kids!! It's become quite a free-for-all in some schools --- and the taxpayers are just having their money wasted. If kids want a social event then let them quit school and join a club.
Excuse me for bucking the police-state mentality -- but assigned seating at lunch? Uh, no.
Yes. Children need to be taught that every rule, no matter how inane or stupid it might seem, is to be followed. The government knows what's best for you.
Seating restrictions at lunch time is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard come out of a public school (and that's saying something). Why not simply make two separate lunch periods to split up the number of kids? There are other, better solutions. These are KIDS. They need to socialize.
Unfortunately, middle school kids can't just "quit school and join a club." They and their parents are there under threat of compulsory education laws. Maybe that's what pisses so many kids and their disinterested parents off. Think about it.
Well, it is changing and perhaps for the better. Public schools that are afraid of losing kids to homeschooling are now offering on-line courses for kids who for one reason or another just don't want to attend the local school and put up with all the nonsense. It's a win-win situation -- kid gets to live the life he wants to live, develops his own interests on his own time (considerably more time than if he attended school for 7 1/2 hours a day) and gets an education, and the school gets a chunk of change for providing the service. Neither has to have much to do with the other if they don't want to.
"Students aren't in school to "interact." "
What would you have them learn? I guess we disagree. Schools have traditionally been expected to serve up moral lessons and good citizenship. How can students learn these things without authentic opportunities to interact with one another?
I'm not saying that the girl shouldn't be punished for challenging a rule, but I am glad that at least one student is doing so!
You noticed that too?
"Laws are for the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools." - Solon, the Lawmaker of Athens, d. 559 BC
LOL, it's all a control thing. I can't image some idiot telling me were I have to sit to eat lunch. Except the military or prison. What joke.
What we need are stricter, crueler, harsher laws for children! (Just kidding!)
I can't completly agree. I had assigned seats when I was in school but I've never heard of assigned lunch seats. Unless this school has a major gang problem I don't see the point of this rule.
I understand where you're coming from. Schools need to teach those things. But if that's *all* they're going to teach, then they don't even need to *serve* lunch. They can have kids come in for four hours a day and go home, to work, to music lessons, etc.
But if we're going to keep this current model, where kids go for 6 or more hours per day, where most people expect schools to mold their moral and social thinking, then we're going to need to allow them the freedom to interact with each other.
And let me add, when I speak of molding moral and social thinking I mean in the positive kinds of ways in which schools have traditionally done this; e.g., don't steal, don't lie, follow the golden rule, etc.
Here's what I'd like to have seen. The students request a change in the rules. Ideally, the school would take them seriously and allow a change on an experimental basis. But if the school said no, then I'd be proud to see those kids engage in civil disobedience inside that school. On a given day all 267 of them walk in and peacefully sit where they like.
The idiots have completely taken over.
The school administration would just have the kids arrested for "disrupting the educational process" no matter how peaceful the kids were.
If they're really unhappy with it, the parents can let the administration know and maybe there'll be a change.
There was a change in policy when one principal in the same state wanted a "silent" lunch for middle school kids and curtailment of bathroom "privileges" this past year, and unhappy parents let the administration know that the kids didn't want to come back next year.
It's all about money and the potential loss of it if no one wants to go to your school.
I'll give ya that one!
Sounds good, but one disruptive student, does nothing. She's had detention before. Maybe she was the wrong one to take the stand.
Also, this is middle school. Why weren't the parents involved if it was so awful for the kids? Perhaps this is an isolated incident.
What would you say if the discipline rationale were only a smokescreen and the real reason for seating assignments was to prevent RACIAL SELF-SEGREGATION that is reported in most school lunchrooms and other free social settings? I checked 236 messages no one has thought of that.
Nah. Not "decorum" -- order it is, and a harsh forced order too. Too much forced order certainly is something that cramps and breaks the high human spirit that real character growth needs. Decorum this is not -- it's too orderly for most Americans to tolerate in most circumstances.
Yet it is a totally proper decision -- the proper and well-used authority of the school board, of the superintendent, of the principal or of the lunch-room staff to make and enforce and in doing so not being subject to overrule. Unles there are very strange facts not reported any judge who tarries with this case -- this frivilous suit and attempts to overrule legitimate authority acting in its porper role -- that judge himeself or herself is a rogue and overrreaching in misfeasance.
The father has a legimate complaint but has sought the wrong venue -- his recourse is through the school, or the school board -- or through the public election process. There are his proper lines of attack -- or even to place his child in a school whose operations better temper to his own.
Not decorum at all! Too much like a jail house mess for free men -- and their children too!
It is legitimate and sometimes necessary in wild districts to use such stern measures. Adults in full sanity and good experience know when to apply such measures in measured ways.
Yet by that very word of the Superindent "decorum" -- it's hideous misuse in context -- a fair guess is he's a master who knows not fish from fowl.
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