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.
I'm still disappointed with the "champions of individual liberty" here at FreeRepublic being so willing to inflict governmental restrictions on others, as well as submit their families to governmental restrictions. Teaching kids to cherish liberty by denying it to them is such a good idea that I think we should extend it to the parents. The first thing government should deny the parents is fire arms. After a few years without them, those parents will really love their fire arms, and government just may consider allowing them ownership, but only at designated times and locations of government's choosing.
If you keep kosher you would know that someone sitting next to eating treif would not render your food treif , unless you put your food down in the exact same spot that their food was just on.
Food allergies; I would think they'd make accomodations for that.
Ok, so with your logic we should let the kids decide which rules to follow eh? Sounds like a good a method for developing law abiding citizens [sarcasm on].
In addition, parents elect legislators and in most cases school boards. If you don't like the rules, do something about it or move.
In addition there is always private education. If you're not willing to pay for private education then don't bitch about the public school's rules. You get what you pay for my friend.
The charter of education should indeed include socialization, but social skills should take a back seat to children learing the principle of order and law. If a person doesent like the laws of his school, city, county, state or country, that dosent mean he can just ignore them. If you teach these kids that principle, you will see an already screwed up generation of kids become full blown anarchists.
I am a patriot of the nth degree. And there are times when rules must be changed (note the word I use here, "changed" not "ignored"), but there are proper means of doing this. Only in the most extreme infringements on liberty should laws be ignored or challenged through civil disobedience or even violence. The 60s/70s generation thinks that it is a good within itself to balk at laws whenever it doesen't fit there tastes and stage protests and sit-ins. That is exactly why this kind of nonesense is happening.
Trust me, I don't agree with what children are being taught these days;political correctness, revised history, reverse discrimination, liberal utopianistic ideology. But the rule of law is the underpinning of any stable society. You begin to chip away at that and you chip away at the bedrock of civilization. Now you may pose yourself as a liberetarian, but there is an important difference between liberty and anarchy, and that is a distinct and dangerous difference.
Even with as little information as we have been given, I'd bet the farm against that.
I find it bemusing in the extreme that the only time the gub'mint schools get support on these threads is when they're acting like Nazis.
>>I find it bemusing in the extreme that the only time the gub'mint schools get support on these threads is when they're acting like Nazis.<<
My FRiend, did you read any of my posts? I don't support what the school is doing. I support the right way of changing things and not teaching our children that breaking the rules individually will get one what one wants.
The parent should have stepped in on the first offense, not sued (representing himself, maybe lawyer?) without trying to change the stupidity on the third.
Individual liberty??? And we're talking about public schools which confiscate thousands of taxpayer dollars --- here it's pay up --- and to the tune of thousands --- or lose your property. If we meant it about individual liberty, we'd get the government out of education completely, shut down the public schools. I've seen schools which are not much more than social clubs and what goes on in the cafeterias can be something we shouldn't have to pay for.
What they should do is change the way schools are completely --- allow students to go for several hours in the morning or in the afternoon --- take their classe --- that would take them maybe 3 or 4 hours each day and then go home --- skip all the socializing --- sometimes that socializing ends up very brutal to the picked on kids --- kids who get bullied or teased --- maybe this is the reason this school went to assigned seating. I'm for it actually because in the schools here the social hour is so important, the kids get their whole schedule rearranged to accomodate having a party with their friends. Drop the physics class at 11:00 if that's when your friends are scheduled for lunch.
You're kidding right?
Not really --- I would just as soon have my kids go to school for 3 or 4 hours but only go to learn. Skip all the "health", the lunch-social hour, the movies, etc. Homeschooling parents can get it all done in an hour or so which tells you the 7 hours kids spend at school is mostly wasted time.
Thank you for your support. The dad who filed the suit. The school in run like prison, and I am offended that don't trust our kids.
I'm glad the Dad is suing. Public schools behave more and more like prison camps than places of education. I pulled my son out.
I believe you need to get a life. The father who filed suit.
Giovanni LoPresti problem is he thinks he's Tony Sopprano, Sorry Giovanni LoPresti those days are past.
HUH? What are you talking about? I haven't even read this article.
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Ah, the Russian sentiment....trade freedom for security.
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Where in the post does it state this?
Get real, you don't have all the facts.
Get the facts straight. The school rule is one detention. My daughter received three detentions for speaking to her friends without a disruption. Had the school followed their polices, (one detention) no suit would have ensued. Moreover, it was only one incident, not three.
For seven years kids had the ability to socialize with 20-25 kids during lunch. Thereafter, kids have recess time. So, after following the school's policy for seven years, as soon as kid enters the middle school, any reasonable freedom they once had are gone. No recess time, no ability to socialize with 20-25 kids. They are only permitted to socialize with 8 kids. Half the time you ask for permission to speak with your friends is denied. The other half-the kid has two minutes at best.
Welcome to Communism 101.
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