yet another innocent victim...

[acroyear]

...of zero-tolerance policies. This time, it wasn't even suspicion of drugs that gets an 8 year old in "jail" for a whole week...

Slashdot Idle Story | 3rd-Grader Busted For Jolly Rancher Possession:

"A third-grader in a small Texas school district received a week's detention for merely possessing a Jolly Rancher. Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch Monday when a teacher confiscated the candy. Her parents said she was in tears when she arrived home later that afternoon and handed them the detention notice. But school officials are defending the sentence, saying the school was abiding by a state guideline that banned 'minimal nutrition' foods. 'Whether or not I agree with the guidelines, we have to follow the rules,' said school superintendent Jack Ellis."

No, Mr. Ellis, you can and do have the absolute right to actually cast real judgement.

You spent how many fucking years and how many fucking dollars in fucking school to get a fucking education and prove that you have the ability to make a fucking judgement call, so don't fucking throw it all away by blaming the fucking system for your lack of a fucking spine.

Did I make that clear enough? Just checking...

Comments

[katrinb.livejournal.com]

Mind, the article points out that it wasn't the candy's nutritional value that earned the punishment, it was that the school has a no-candy-or-gum rule because hard candy and gum in youthful hands often make a mess that's hard to clean up. Reasonable enough to have such a rule, though I don't like that it's enforced unevenly - not useful for small children who need consistent rules. (The principal said there'd be no punishment, say, for chocolate kisses, because it's the harder candy that makes a mess.)

But detention is too much punishment, even for a day, let alone a whole week. (We're worried about obesity, and yet the punishment is to take away a kid's chance for active play at recess for a week?) The appropriate punishment is to simply confiscate the candy and leave it at that.

[faireraven.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is that the principal is blaming it on the nutritional value laws, not the "cleanup rules" that the school has.

Part of it is having too much of a "zero tolerance policy", and yes, being inconsistent about it. If you're going to say "no hard candy", what about twizzlers? What about taffy? Taffy is difficult to remove if it's sat on/squished in/etc, but it's not a hard candy. And chocolate can still make a difficult-to-clean mess if it's on things like carpet.

When I was in junior high, we had a "no gum" rule, where the kid would first get a warning, then get a "lunch detention" (where they had to eat lunch in a little quiet room without everyone else), but since we didn't have recess by that age, it wasn't like it was a punishment that wasn't fitting the crime, you just didn't get to eat lunch with your peers. Gym class was an extra class.

(mind you, we had a problem with someone in junior high whose mother was a candy salesperson (worked for M&M Mars), and he brought in gum to sell. They actually started treating it as a drug crackdown to track it down, because it literally became an epidemic of gum chewing throughout the school. They were throwing so many kids into lunch detention on a daily basis they ran out of space in the detention room, until they finally tracked down which kid was selling gum, and put him into after-school detention for a week and asked his mother to stop allowing him to have bulk candy/gum).

I can see escalating to a punishment if the first time doesn't work, but a week of detentions for one piece of candy is ridiculous.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

What Faireraven said about cleaning up chocolate. If it gets warm and ground into stuff it can be very difficult to clean up.

BTW, Icon aimed at the situation, not you.

[katrinb.livejournal.com]

Well, as I said, I don't like the inconsistent rules there.
And I really, really detest schools playing the food police. I get to set my son's nutritional rules. That's my prerogative, and my husband's. Not theirs.
I really also hate the way the "war on childhood obesity" somehow always, always, ALWAYS turns into a "war on obese children." But that's another story.