School Suspensions Lead to Legal Challenge

[groovedaddy]

CHOCOWINITY, N.C. — As school let out one day in January 2008, students from rival towns faced off. Two girls flailed away for several seconds and clusters of boys pummeled each other until teachers pulled them apart.

The fistfights at Southside High School involved no weapons and no serious injuries, and in some ways seemed as old-fashioned as the country roads here in eastern North Carolina. But the punishment was strictly up-to-date: Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and briefly arrested a dozen students. The school suspended seven of them for a short period and six others from the melee, including the two girls, for the entire semester.

As extra punishment, the girls were told they could not attend Beaufort County’s alternative school for troubled students and were denied aid to study at home.

Their punishment was typical of the get-tough, “zero tolerance” discipline policies that swept the nation over the last two decades, resulting in an increase in suspensions that are disproportionate among black students. School officials here say they acted to preserve a “safe and orderly environment.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/education/19suspend.html?th&emc=th

[GodlessBiker]

1. What level of misconduct is necessary to deprive a student of a portion of his or her education?

Interesting question.

[jtuck004]

2. Maybe they could tie them to chairs with headphones playing American Idol?

Just to make sure they don't learn anything remotely useful? Did they also offer to refund their parents taxes who will be paying for the schools while their children are denied?

'Cause, you know, people learned a lot of things before there were schools...

How, exactly, does denying them alternative school and homestudy aid "preserve a “safe and orderly environment.”?

I can understand not letting them go to the school where there needs to be a certain amount of responsibility shown
on the student's part, but either education is important, or it is not.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. Our school system was designed to feed the needs of the industrial

revolution and an industrial society.

Now that the industrial revolution is over, and we are in a post-industrial society, education is no longer relevant - it just makes the masses unhappy and discontented.

This is part and parcel with closing 'unproductive' schools, rather than improving them, and teaching to the test, rather than teaching to educate.

Our long experiment with democracy is almost over.