The Comment of the Day is from Joshua, from the lively thread on the post “Facebook Wars: Parental Abdication, School Abuse of Power.” Continue reading
no-tolerance
Facebook Wars: Parental Abdication, School Abuse of Power
Student Facebook pages were much in the news yesterday. One student was suspended from an Illinois school for posting a list of girls at his high school ranked by appearance and sexual proclivities, while another school, Uniondale High, contacted authorities in Nassau County who prevailed upon Facebook to take down a similar page posting provocative comments about high school girls in various area high schools. Uniondale says it has a “no tolerance” policy toward cyber-bullying.
When did schools suddenly acquire disciplinary control over what students do when they aren’t at school? Continue reading
No-Tolerance Idiocy of the Year: Southern Lee High School in Sanford, N.C.
Ethics Alarms has not yet completed its annual Best and Worst of Ethics lists for 2010, but I’ll hand out this title right now. The persecution of student Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, N.C., has all the elements that make no-tolerance enforcement of school rules ethically offensive: a lack of common sense, absence of proportion, dismissal of empathy, rejection of fairness and justice, disregard for the welfare of an innocent child, and most of all, incompetent, cowardly, utterly stupid school administrators.
Yes, I think we have a winner. Continue reading
Worst No-Tolerance Drug Policy Ever
The idiotic story you are about to read is true.
Rachael Greer, a seventh grade student in Jeffersonville, Indiana, explains that a girl walked into the school locker room with a bag of pills during Rachel’s gym class.
“She was talking to another girl and me about them and she put one in my hand and I was like, ‘I don’t want this,’ so I put it back in the bag and I went to gym class,” said Rachael. The pills were the prescription ADHD drug, Adderall. During the next period, an assistant principal took Rachael out of class. The girl who offered her the pills and a few other students had been apprehended, and to her surprise, Rachel was to join them in their punishment. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: School Principal Evelyn Matroianni
Reading news stories about cruel, power-abusing, or judgement-deficient teachers and school administrators is like eating potato chips, I’ve discovered. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. Luckily for my waistline and cholesterol levels, eventually potato chip bags become empty. Unfortunately, the supply of terrible tales of student abuse appears to be bottomless.
In Staten Island, 9-year-old Patrick Timoney, a fourth-grader at PS 52, South Beach, was observed by his school principal playing with LEGOs during his lunch period. One of the LEGO action figures was carrying what appeared to be a toy automatic weapon. The principal, Evelyn Matroianni took Patrick, crying and frightened, into her office, and called the boy’s mother. She told her that she considered the toy a violation of the no-tolerance rule prohibiting guns and gun replicas, and that she was going to confirm this with a security administrator from the city Department of Education. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 