Is it just me, or do school administrators actually seem to be competing to find the most inane and unfair reasons for booting kids off campus?
In addition to the recent cases of Wesley Juhl and Angela Scatudo, who face punishment because of personal weblogs, we now have the sad case of Wisconsin high school student Sashwat Singh, whose off-color rhymes - performed off school grounds - have resulted in a five-day suspension; expulsion is still a possibility. It seems the honor student recorded a rap CD that the Brookfield Central High principal doesn't much like:
Over the course of three months, Sashwat Singh wrote and recorded a 32-minute, 14-track rap compact disc featuring rants that made reference to illegal drug use and explicit sexual acts. He denigrates classmates, his mother and his high school. One track is a rap he used when campaigning to be class treasurer.
School administrators called the disc, which includes a song about the principal, Mark Cerutti, and conditions at the school, "gross disobedience or misconduct," an offense on par with making a bomb threat, bringing guns to school and arson...
Let's restate that, for emphasis. A personal musical recording with vulgar and obnoxious lyrics is as threatening to school safety as bringing guns to school or burning the schoolhouse down. I find that hard to believe, and I bet some Columbine parents would be much happier today had Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold done nothing worse than make an anti-Columbine CD.
Sashwat Singh insisted the lyrics weren't meant as a threat, but "just random words that rhymed. I didn't think I had done anything wrong."...
Cerutti said that he first became aware of Sashwat Singh's CD on Oct. 29, and that he was suspended later that day. Matt Gibson, the Elmbrook School District superintendent, said he was "fact-finding to determine whether or not to move it toward expulsion...
Singh's suspension may mark the first time a high school student in Wisconsin has been removed from school for a song he'd written, said Ken Cole, the executive director of the Madison-based Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
Cole said a threat couched in music made outside school "isn't a matter of all in good sport or fun. If some incident occurs a month from now, someone will say, 'You knew back then.' We have to treat every incident very seriously"...
Emphasis on that phrase mine, because in this context, that phrase means schools cannot use any personal judgment to decide whether to punish an honors student, who takes AP classes and is a member of the school's band and choir, when that student has the motivation and technological savvy needed to record an album entirely on his home computer. The fact that Singh is smart, took school seriously, and apparently had no background of violence of criminal behavior is of no consequence. The most important thing is to ensure that students are forbidden, 24 hours a day, from expressing thoughts that anyone in the academic environment might find unsettling or distasteful, regardless of the student doing the thinking and the context in which that thinking is expressed.
That is what taking each incident "very seriously" means these days. Joanne Jacobs agrees with the "police state" description given to this school, and so do I.
Dan Macallair, the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, said the suspension is indicative of a national trend toward zero tolerance in schools. "We're punishing kids for things that we adults never would have been punished for when we were that age," he said. "If we try to criminalize every comment that adolescents made, all our kids would be locked up."
Believe me, the educrats are working on that. Way down in Florida, sixteen-year-old Ryan Richter has been expelled based on a stick-figure drawing that another student found threatening:
Richter, a LaBelle High School sophomore, sketched a figure shooting another figure. He did the sketch in a recent geometry class and passed it along to a friend and thought nothing else of it. The classroom doodling, however, got him suspended for a week and as of Monday’s disciplinary hearing, got him kicked out of LaBelle High and recommended for a 45-day stint in Hendry County’s alternative high school...
A student told school authorities that Richter said the dead stick figure was a direct reference to someone and the pony-tailed shooter was a depiction of himself, according to Richter’s account of Monday’s meeting. Richter, who wears his black hair in a pony tail, said the stick-figure shooter wasn’t him and the victim wasn’t anyone at his school.
That must have been one damn fine stick-figure drawing if school officials believe that it's 100% accurate in representing Richter and his "victim," dontcha think?
The school principal referred all calls to Superintendent Thomas Conner. Conner said he can’t comment on the case directly because it’s a confidential student matter. But he did say school officials take threats of violence seriously.
Using the definition of "seriously" that I outlined above, in which actions are removed from context, inflated beyond all belief, and used to apply punitive sanctions to students who are in no other way a threat, yes, I'd say officials are taking this "seriously."
Richter’s artwork does have a violent bent, his parents said. He likes to draw a cartoon character he calls “Little Paranoid Happy Dude,” whose personality can snap from happy-go-lucky to raging mad. But the elder Richter and Ross don’t think their son has problems. They say he’s a driven young man who wants to be an architect and finish high school early so he can start college...
[Nearby] Lee County’s zero tolerance rules are similarly strict, according to a review of the district’s student code of conduct. Punishments for fights, threats or weapons violations range from detention to suspension to expulsion, depending on the seriousness of the offense.
I suppose now that cartoon violence will now be added to the list of forbidden activities, if it hasn't been already. After all, Florida is the same state in which honors student Lindsay Brown was forbidden from attending graduation in 2001 because a steak knife was found in her car. She spent nine hours in a jail cell before that decision was made, by the way.
Update: Here's John Hawkins of RightWingNews, whose attitude is, "Hey if school officials want to be afraid of stick figures, HERE's a good one for 'em."
As John puts it so well: "Viva la stick figure violence! Up with freedom of expression, down with fussbudgets!"
Posted by kswygert at November 13, 2003 01:01 PM