You know it’s time to homeschool when…the school nurse is named “Ratched.”
Today, blogger Glenn Reynolds wrote, “You know, I’m beginning to think that sending your kids to public schools is starting to look like parental malpractice.” On the way to the decision to home school my son, I reached the same conclusion years ago, and nearly every day brings more evidence to support the decision. Here, for example, are two recent news stories, one alarming, the other horrifying:
In Walker, Michigan, Kenowa Hills High School Principal Katie Pennington suspended 65 students for riding their bikes to school on the last day of their senior year. The students had organized the event carefully; they had a police escort and Walker Mayor Rob VerHeulen provided donuts for the early morning riders. He also rode in a police cruiser leading the cyclists, as parents stood along the route, taking pictures and cheering for their kids.
When they arrived, however, the seniors were suspended, causing them to miss various graduation-related exercises. Why, you ask? Pennington felt that their mode of transportation was “too dangerous” and that school administrators should have been consulted. She also thought the bike brigade caused traffic problems. District Superintendent Gerald Hopkins agreed and for that, both of these power-mad, arrogant dictators should be forced to seek employment elsewhere.
Who made school administrators the transportation czars in Walker? If a child wants to go to school by foot, roller-skates, pogo stick or ox-cart it is absolutely none of Pennington’s beeswax, and that she could even think otherwise for a second should tell us how much Big Brotherism is infecting our culture. The suspension was a bright-line abuse of power, injecting school authority where it does not belong, and punishing students, unjustly, for their private conduct.
Oh, Pennington apologized, eventually, and the students were reinstated: not good enough. This principal, this school system, this educational system, this profession is imbued with arrogance and incompetence throughout, and a mindset that would allow any principle to even consider punishing students for their personal transportation choices cannot be fixed with an apology. A re-education camp would be more like it.
Yet Kenowa Hills High is educational nirvana compared to Deltona High School in Volusia, Forida. In that outpost of Hell, the school nurse refused to allow 17-year-old Michael Rudi to use his inhaler as he was having an asthma attack, because his medical release form lacked a proper parental signature. He was writhing on the floor, losing consciousness, and the nurse stood by, watching him. She did alert his parents, however. Nice of her.
The Director of Student Health Services, Cheryl Selesky, told the media that the district is looking into whether proper procedures were followed by the school. The nurse was correct not to give the suffocating child his medicine (it had been confiscated from his locker), she said, since nurses can’t give medications without the proper authorization. It is district policy to call 911 when a student cannot breath, however. Selesky said she could not explain why the nurse didn’t call 911.
I can’t explain why people this hopelessly brain-dead and black-hearted, who would claim that a nurse watching a student die on her floor, like Regina in “The Little Foxes ” withholding the nitroglycerine pills from her husband as he goes into cardiac arrest, was following “correct procedure.” I can’t understand why parents tolerate the schools functioning like this, and I can’t understand an educational profession that won’t get serious about insisting on professional standards among its teachers and administrators.
Sending your kids to public schools is starting to look like parental malpractice? For at least one Florida school, it is starting to look like murder.
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Spark: Glenn Reynolds
Facts:
Graphic: Lunch at 11:30
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
Is there a reason you used the qualifier “public” in this post? Private schools are also little fiefdoms, just more legally so.
Good question. And you’re right.
Ah, but a paying customer has more say over the quality of the product.
Ah, but tax payers are paying customers.
Do you really feel you are a “customer” of your county/school district? You have a choice of whether to pay the taxes or not, and you have control of what your money is spent on? I want to live where you live.
Sure, but you can take your tuition check elsewhere. And that will get the attention of the administrators.
A quote from the boy’s mother-
‘When Rudi suffered an asthma attack, the school nurse called the teen’s mother, Susan Rudi, who told the nurse to call 911.
“I told her to call 911, I’m on my way. She said ‘I’m leaving at 2 p.m.’ She didn’t want to help my child,” Rudi said.’
Sweet. Wonder what she had to do that day that was that important….
The elementary school I went to banned Oreos because the parent company of Nabisco at that time was a Cigarette company. I guess it wasn’t enough that I had to listen to a few hours of anti-smoking presentations every year I apparently was expected to hate the tobacco companies as well.
In my child’s school a special needs girl was sexually assaulted (not rape – touching only, thank goodness) by a special needs boy when the adults (teachers) failed/refused to properly supervise the two children in accordance with procedures put in place after a PRIOR incident involving the same two children. The response from the school administration: suspend the boy from school (all blame placed on a special needs child who clearly didn’t know what he was doing was wrong), pull the girl into a conference with a child psychologist and other school personnel and scare the hell out of her with pictoral social stories about what to do in case of sexual assault (all without the permission/knowledge of the child’s parent), fail to notify the girl’s parent until 5.5 hours AFTER the event/damage control took place … and NO disciplinary action taken with regard to the teachers who were grossly negligent/failed to supervise the children. And that’s just ONE of the nightmare stories from the school this year. Not so easy to home school when a child has profound special needs. My child will be out placed next year. Of course … the school district wants to pay for the cheapest, least appropriate placement instead of the appropriate placement, so it will have to be litigated. And the placement decision is only good for 1 year. So it could have to be litigated EVERY year.
So many people complain about the high cost of educating our children in public schools, and the cost of special education in particular. These costs could be greatly reduced if educators simply made the right, moral and ethical decisions regarding our children.
When I read your first story, my first thought was, “Hey, he accidentally put the horrifying one in front of the alarming one.”
I wish I was right.
Like every President before him, I’m pretty sure Obama has talked about wanting to help education. Based on this evidence, I wonder if there’s anything that can be done.
Sure. The profession needs to start policing itself, insisting on real credentials, and stop acting like the Teamsters.
What honest incentive do they have to stop acting like the Teamsters? As far as my limited understanding, things worked out pretty OK for them.
Maybe that’s the problem with corporate loyalty, unions, political parties, religion, everything. Everything that sorts people into smaller groups, us vs. them, causes people to value the GROUP instead of the values that led the group to be formed in the first place. Groups will inevitably attract tin-eared thugs who can’t listen to anything with their own hearts and just follow the letter of the rules, and organizations can’t cut them loose, for whatever damn reason. People cling to rules when they have no relevance because they grew into their position the way a marshmallow expands when you microwave it. It might fit the shape of the jar, and know the jar intimately, but there is no spine to be found, so there can be no discretion, no thought, and thus, no errors.
I have a friend who would like nothing more than for schools to take the policy that, if a child stubbornly does not WANT to learn or makes it bad for kids who DO (bullies), they should be kicked out of school and not be permitted to get an education until they shape up. They’d be left the crap jobs and the people who want to achieve would flourish. Perhaps a bit starry-eyed and optimistic, but at least HE acknowledges that there are sometimes bad apples that hurt the development of those that surround them. I think every kid deserves the chance to be educated, but our world is absolutely teeming with heartless adults. We need them not in our education system.
Having fields police themselves is the problem. Every field wants to keep others from policing them, but few want to take on the task of actually policing themselves. The ‘policing’ eventually degenerates into a “don’t blow the whistle on me and I won’t blow the whistle on you” bargain. This is how the legal and medical professions work. The ‘get the snitch’ instinct is too strong. An outside agency is required.
The problem here is that people are too scared of the teachers to do anything. The people in these towns should recall their school board, but what can the board do? Even if they fire the principal, all they can do is hire another principlal just like her and the new principal and the faculty will take their revenge on a populace that dared to challenge their authority.
The first principal suspended 65 seniors because they dared to organize an activity without paying homage to her first. They went to the city, the mayor, and the police, but they didn’t ask her first. They organized a small parade, but the principal is now their 24 hour, ultimate authority. These people may now be 18 and don’t need their parents permission, but the do need their principal’s. They were soundly punished for their insolence and for involving another authority without the permission of their sovereign lord.
I have posted this before. It is a canard, it is unfair, it is unjust and it is blatant stereotyping. And here goes:
Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach; those who cannot teach, teach teachers; those who cannot teach teachers….become school administrators.
Sounds all too accurate to me. At least, in places where unions rule the roost. I still look on in morbid fascination at what American public schools have become in my lifetime.
Agreed. I am so saddened by the demise of common sense.
Political correctness does that to people!
Gotta agree with the principal for suspending the students over the bikes. Bicycles are a liability to a school. The children could have them stolen or injure themselves on school property while riding them. The bicycles open the school up to many potential liability lawsuits. And it doesn’t take many lawsuits to be very very expensive. So kudos to the principal for making a good decision. Too bad she caved in to public pressure.
Nonsense. The school had no rule against bikes, nor should it have had. A school isn’t liable for theft on its property. And the principle didn’t cite those bogus reasons, but the safety of the journey, which is none of her business. She was making up rules that didn’t exist…as are you.
Using your faulty logic, you could also say the same things for cars. Or heavy textbooks. Or protractors. Man, you know how sharp those things can be? Hell, by further extending your “logic”, we shouldn’t even have school buses, since those would be a liability if there happened to be a crash.
Jack: Both my hometown and where I go to college have greater population densities than Walker, and if we can manage to hold small parades and marathons on our roads, biking to school with a goddamn police escort shouldn’t be an issue; hell, it’s probably no less safe than actually driving a car to school.