Fark.com labeled this story, "Cincinnati Public Schools expels kindergartners for stabbing classmates in face, bringing weapons to school. "Experts" blame everything under the sun except terrible parents."
Fark is exaggerating, though; "fractured families" are on this list of causes - after TV and video games:
A student at Quebec Heights School in Price Hill strikes his classmates and kicks a teacher. A student at Princeton's Woodlawn Elementary stabs another kid in the face with a plastic fork. A student at New Burlington Elementary in Springfield Township urinates in a garbage can.
All three students are expelled or suspended from school. All three students are kindergartners. Forget recess, storybook corner and sharing hour. For some 5-year-olds, kindergarten means fights and classroom tantrums - behavior problems so severe that little kids sometimes are kicked out of school...
Experts blame many factors: Sex and violence on television and in video games, undiagnosed mental illness, poverty, fractured families and zero-tolerance for trouble at school. Kids are stressed out. And many kindergartens did away with naptime a decade or more ago.
Hard to believe that removal of naptime alone is responsible for an upswing in violence in the ABC's set. And if five-year-olds are watching violent videos, um, whose fault is that?
And the violent kindergarteners do have some defenders - their parents:
But others, including some parents and child advocates, say biting, kicking and temper tantrums are normal behavior for 5- and 6-year-olds. This group says that expelling or suspending kindergartners just sets children up for failure - at a far too tender age.
"If a child does something extreme, you have to look at why," says Rochelle Morton, former vice president of education and youth development at the Urban League of Greater Cincinnati. "Putting a child out of school is not going to help."
Yes, but is a school permitted to say, "We looked at why this child is biting everyone withing teething range, and we decided it's the parent's fault?" If schools don't have the power to say that anymore - and I bet that power is diminishing every day - why should they look for root causes instead of applying discipline?
Posted by kswygert at February 24, 2004 10:59 AM