Posted on 12/14/2014 2:35:03 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The first time she witnessed a student's major tantrum — a 2-year-old hurling a toy stove filled with plastic pots and pans—Shanikia Johnson had just started as a teacher at Little Flowers Child Development Center in West Baltimore.
She knew toddlers acted out. But the rage-filled reaction, triggered when Johnson wouldn't allow the boy to play with a toy, stunned the 22-year-old teacher. Then, time and time again, she saw other children throwing classroom furniture. Bookcases, chairs, tables—all were flung around the room.
Some students bit classmates, leaving teeth marks on hands and cheeks; a few threatened to hurt staff members. Other children, dubbed “runners,” darted out of the building and down barren city blocks, with frantic teachers on their heels. The encounters exhausted Johnson and other teachers, who began to see the children as troublemakers.
But the day care center's owner, Crystal Hardy-Flowers, urged the staff to be patient with the children, who often were like any other preschoolers—dancing to music, playing tea party and clamoring for space on a teacher's lap. The former social worker understood something that her teachers did not. The kids were growing up in Upton/Druid Heights, where backyard police chases are common and sirens wake up kids like unwelcome alarm clocks at night. Almost every day, in some way, the kids were exposed to violence.
“It's not just bad behavior. It is not just defiance,” Hardy-Flowers said. “No, it is deeper than that. People just don't pick up chairs and throw them at you. Children don't just run out of the building.”
Science increasingly shows that Hardy-Flowers is right. Even as shootings, stabbings and murder trials grab the spotlight, violence in Baltimore is exacting another insidious, often invisible, toll — warping the health and development of the city's youngest residents. For every child who is shot, provoking public outrage,...
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
Education and civil rights groups have dubbed this phenomenon the "school-to-prison pipeline." There are big racial differences in how school discipline is meted out: students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled that white students, even when the infractions are the same.
A new government study on discipline in the nation's public schools shows just how very early that gap is present. According to the report, black children make up 18 percent of preschoolers, but make up nearly half of all out-of-school suspensions. (We're talking mostly four-year-olds, people.).....
[STATS]
....The report doesn't specify why there are such glaring disparities in school punishment, much less why those begin in preschool.
But an interesting study released in February suggests a contributing factor. A team of Harvard researchers found that black boys faced harsher punishment because they're often perceived as older than they actually are."
[snip]
That information doesn't at all explain the preschool discipline gap, because the study's participants were looking at children who were at least a half-decade older.
In January, Attorney General Eric Holder criticized "zero-tolerance" policies that quickly involve the criminal justice system for infractions like truancy and smoking. "A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal's office, not in a police precinct," he said.
He called on schools to find other ways to discipline students that didn't remove kids from school for long stretches of time. He urged that school suspensions and expulsions happen only as a last resort."
Rattle off the top thirty urban areas of America, and you will notice the exact same issue. It’s why ‘flight’ has occurred and why we look more and more like South Africa. You end up with compounds, hidden valleys, and protected neighborhoods where the people with assets live, and they drive into the urban zone to make their living.
Go look at the Atlanta Braves and the logic of a new stadium ten miles north of the city. It’ll be within a zone where they can put in condo buildings, hotels, upscale pubs and drinking establishments....and have their own private security walking the perimeter, with a feel-good and safe goal in mind. Gone are the days when you parked your car around the old stadium and worried about what would happen later after dark as you walked back.
It’s the future...like it or not.
They (children) do this because they see their welfare mothers do this. In McDonalds, Burger King - wherever. Entitled welfare women throwing a hissy fit when they don’t get their way is an ‘entitlement’ too.
NEVER, and I mean NEVER, trust a woman with a hyphenated name.
I spent the war years in this area of Balmore(39-45).
Pre school years were a lot different then. Maybe these efforts described will have more effect than night basketball.
So let's load them up on buses every morning and ship them off to someone else's neighborhood.
I see a marked shift in treating school violence (never let a crisis go to waste) as a healthcare issue and not as a discipline problem.
The Left is creating monsters and now they must parley that crisis into more government.
It’s what they do. It’s where they live. It’s not going to stop. They’re destroying lives, crippling minds, all in the name of justice. Bull. It’s all in the name of power and control.
Big cities are scum magnets.
Making school violence a healthcare issue means another push for more gun control.
Obamacare will effect everything and everyone - more government, more government, more government = socialism.
Children dont cause this, ADULTS, IRRESPONSIBLE ADULTS who embrace encourage and support the thug lifestyle support this, Here is the problem that you and I and the bleeding hearts cant fix because the people who are in it DONT WANT TO FIX IT! Worse off is the politicians now, the black politicians are now embracing and protecting the thug lifestyle, look no further than ferguson. So how do they fix it they ask for more money. Im tired, fix your house on your own Im tapped out and dont care
What utter nonsense .. absent guidance and discipline, children will easily morph into pint-sized savages.
To salvage the chillen: rein in the feral 'adults', re-establish proper nuclear families, lose the absurd slave mentality, contribute to society rather than leeching from it, etc .. etc .. etc.
< /futility post >
Isn’t it true that iffen your kid misbehaves and acts crazy, you are entitled to A LOT MORE $$$$$$$$$$$$$ per month in “assistance” programs???
This just makes economic sense.
Thanks for linking to a very interesting article. This bit is from further down:
“Carrion has compared the MRI brain scans of highly stressed children, including those who live amid violence, to those of healthy youngsters. They showed overall decreased brain volume in children with high cortisol levels. Key areas responsible for complex learning also were smaller. The work, among the newest findings in the field, is still in its early stages and needs more development, but some scientists consider it significant.
Researchers like Carrion believe that — in a child who can’t sit still in school, or is so agitated that he or she throws a chair — the brain is so busy fending off stress that other key areas don’t develop properly. Carrion’s scans of stressed children found a smaller prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive functions such as attention span, planning and organizing, goal-setting and behavior control. Carrion also gave the stressed children attention and memory tests — and the prefrontal cortex was not as active.
Other brain scan studies showed stunted growth of the hippocampus, which may inhibit a child’s ability to form new memories, learn or control emotions. The symptoms were worse for kids who experienced trauma more directly, Carrion said.”
This could explain a lot about the problems found in urban cores. The question remains. What is a realistic way to break this pattern in a free society?
People need to get off the generational welfare state treadmill; when someone doesn't have the excitement and satisfaction working and producing, they go stir crazy. Crippled, wasted mines and lives, that's what progressives have done to the black family - and they're working on doing this same thing to the entire country.
The Left has created war zones in poor neighborhoods but their fellow progressives prefer to ignore that and write stories instead about traumatized children in other countries (and Hollywood celebrities make well publicized adoptions to show that they care).
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