“I know you love these,” wrote the friend and reader who sent me the latest example of student abuse by school administrators who have lost their minds. No, I really don’t. They make me sick and angry and leave me with the feeling of having just stepped off the curve and had a bus whiz by close enough for me to feel the breeze. If this happened to my son, I could see myself snapping and going for the responsible administrator’s throat. This was not an inconsiderable factor is choosing to home school.
Glen Meadow Middle School (in Vernon, N.J.) seventh grader Ethan Chaplin told reporters that he was twirling a pencil with a pen cap on in math class when a student who harassed him earlier in the day shouted, “He’s making gun motions! Send him to juvie!” As local school Superintendent Charles Maranzano explained, policy and law requires him to investigate any time a student is made “uncomfortable” or threatened by another student. Thus it was that Ethan was summarily stripped, forced to give blood samples (which allegedly caused him to pass out) and urine samples, so he could be tested for drugs. Four hours later a social worker cleared him to return to class, but a doctors decreed that a five-hour physical and psychological evaluation was necessary before the boy would be allowed back in school.
Then they hooked up Ethan to electrodes, and measured his reactions to pictures of cheerleaders, guns and drugs, and when his vital signs showed a positive response to a photo, he was hit with a mild electric shock.
OK, I’m just kidding about the last part.
But the rest is outrageous enough. I suppose this is more post-Sandy Hook hysteria. I don’t care.
The entire community is responsible for allowing schools like this to exist, administrators so challenged in basic concepts of common sense and justice to be hired, and their children to be educated in institutions so warped by fear and stupidity. A horde of lawyers should descend on Vernon and punish it severely, not only the school. Every single responsible parent should withhold their children from these insane abuse-factories until satisfactory reforms and overhauls of staff can be assured. If this account is true, the institutionalized child abuse in Vernon should be as big a story as Chris Cristie’s bridge traffic scandal, or bigger.
This is the United States of America, dammit, and our children must not be treated this way.
________________________________
Pointer: Barbara Kimmel
Source: NJ.com
Ethics Alarms 
Another brain dead school administrator. Actually this incident looks more like the last scene in the movie “1984”
An ongoing symptom of the wussification of society. If you FEEL threatened, whoever you point to threatened you. If you FEEL uncomfortable, someone is guilty of making you feel so. If you FEEL bullied, if you FEEL harassed, if you FEEL neglected… I could go on. We’ve got people demanding we just ignore immigration law because it FEELS bad to deport someone with a family, and in the same breath demanding that accused lawbreakers be stripped of legal protections because it FEELS icky that the guy you are pretty sure is guilty gets to hire a lawyer. Hell, parents are leaving kids unvaccinated because the FEEL like the schedule probably isn’t right.
The rule of law, the scientific method, rule of debate, codes of conduct… these things are designed to produce good results. A thinking person realizes that they may be biased, and uses formal rules and guidelines to help them stay logical and consistent. These people are a dying breed, it would seem, being overwhelmed by the tide of those screaming “But that doesn’t FEEL right!”
Another example of a NJ school district with an “interim” per diem Superintendent. This is what happens when leadership is non existent.
“Non existent” leadership would be an improvement over aggressively stupid leadership, no?
Unfortunately, aggressively stupid leadership is not uncommon.
Ladies and gentlemen (and Beth)…
I give you yet another example for why I speak like I do…
Because fuck people like that. Fuck them in the god damn eye.
Tag is forbidden in some public schools now too. Unbelievable.
And that’s why we send our kiddos to private school.
“Hoard” is the wrong word there.
Right word, terrible spelling of it. Fixed…thanks.
A whole new way to bully just opened up for the unscrupulous. Cry gun and point at the person you want to ensure lives in hell for the next few years. These kind of accusations, (also false sexual harassment and phony raaaaacism charges) will follow a person for the rest of their life.
It would be hard to find a more loathsome example of abuse of power.
What is the benefits of compulsory schooling, again?
Once, I would have said the counterpoint to your hypothetical was the social learning that goes along with bullying. The world will not protect you from jerks unless they cross certain lines, and those who draw the attention of bullies learn some valuable combination of retaliation, toning down their weirdness, doing more socially acceptable things, and creating their own social groups- all of which are more useful life skills than knowing the primary exports of Tunisia.
Unfortunately when zero tolerance policies, institutional terror of lawsuits, administrative disdain for the weird kids, and teacher stupidity and apathy collide, we are now teaching some kids a very different lesson. You can pick your battles, but when the entire system decides to take the bully’s side and fuck you you’d better just clench up and hope it’s over soon.
I think that is the wrong question. At this point it’s, “Who benefits from compulsory education system?”
Teachers unions.
Yep.
A useful razor to apply to supporters of any particular program or policy to divide between those who think there is a value in it for it’s named recipients and those who think there is a value in it for themselves:
Follow the money.
Arguments can be made on a outcome per $ basis that Public Education is currently a colossal failure.
I’d like to know what the bully’s father does for a living. It almost sounds like the act was a deliberate set up.
Obviously in view of the negative tests, the child who said “He’s making gun motions! Send him to juvie!” should be charged with making terrorist threats, just as if he’d phoned in a bomb hoax call.
If the Administrators are to be consistent with their insistance that they were “just following the law”.
It won’t, for a few reasons- the obvious and most cynical is that administrators don’t want to admit the system does stupid things. However, there’s also the American terror of “victim blaming.” If the accuser were punished, you’d have a mob yelling that “He was scared! You punished him for coming forward, what did you expect him to do, keep his fright to himself? Now the next person who sees a rampaging murderer with a shotgun won’t say anythign so he doesn’t get punished! Think of the children!”
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http://ktla.com/2014/04/10/high-school-students-protest-suspension-of-science-teacher-in-downtown-la/#axzz2yaimQfo0
Sheer, terrifying lunacy.