8 ms·

> Malachi was suspended through the end of the school year, exactly three months. In what world is a 3 month suspension appropriate at all? At that point you'r

• a3n 5y ago
  I suspect there was bureaucratic and personal digging in once the district and its technical staff were challenged.
  • lamontcg 5y ago
    You know that Family Guy meme with the skin tones?
• labster 5y ago
  Welcome to America, where we use political correctness to put people of color in their place. We’re only a couple decades removed from that kid getting a beating by the cops, so things are improving. So three months suspension is getting off light. Our schools don’t have solitary confinement yet but I’m sure we’ll get there someday. Sure, we could try treating the student as a person, but that just makes it harder for society to exact the retribution it so deeply desires.
  • iudqnolq 5y ago
    > Our schools don’t have solitary confinement yet "The spaces have gentle names: The reflection room. The cool-down room. The calming room. The quiet room. But shut inside them, in public schools across the state, children as young as 5 wail for their parents, scream in anger and beg to be let out." https://features.propublica.org/illinois-seclusion-rooms/school-students-put-in-isolated-timeouts/ https://features.propublica.org/illinois-seclusion-rooms/sch...
    • thebigman433 5y ago
      Stuff like this is so infuriating to read. I work in a preschool and there is absolutely a way to have kids take a short break away from others without literally torturing them. Its genuinely hard to read stories like that and think about the kind of teachers that exist in some areas. And its clearly systemic in a lot of situations.
    • taneq 5y ago
      This is just time out. Any parent of a high-maintenance 5-year-old will know that some kids act out, assault their peers, have tantrums and scream and yell. Other kids don’t deserve to be subjected to that. Edit: To be clear, I’m responding to the quote here. I’m not condoning locking small children in bare rooms alone for hours on end.
      • duckfang 5y ago
        Because a 3 ft by 3 ft by 7 ft upright locking coffin is a PERFECT place for timeout.
        • taneq 5y ago
          Because that’s clearly what I was saying, right?
          • jumelles 5y ago
            It's literally exactly what you said...?
          • shkkmo 5y ago
            It does appear to be what you are saying. The linked article is discussing how common it is For schools to lock young children in tiny rooms by themselves. One room in the article is described as 3x3x7 and another is even smaller at 5 sq feet. These are literally the rooms we are discussing and that you are defending using for timeouts. Edit: It appears from your edit that you simply may have not read the article and thus did not realize what you were endorsing.
  • hellomyguys 5y ago
    Before clicking the article I already guessed the student was black. “How US schools punish Black kids”https://www.vox.com/videos/21507661/school-discipline-race-black-students https://www.vox.com/videos/21507661/school-discipline-race-b...
  • fnord77 5y ago
    > Our schools don’t have solitary confinement they sure did when I was a pupil, a zillion years ago. It was called "in-school detention"
    • OJFord 5y ago
      'Isolation' in the UK, which doesn't beat about the bush much does it. I don't really see anything wrong with it. (I'd say a 'detention' is broader, anything from a few minutes at the end of the lesson to isolation, passing break time, lunch, and after-school along the way.)
      • perl4ever 5y ago
        "The entire United Nations, including the US, passed “Mandela Rules” prohibiting solitary beyond 15 days for any person, because it otherwise would amount to torture."
        • LegitShady 5y ago
          Pretty sure school isolation isn't 15 days.
        • fnord77 5y ago
          shocked the US didn't veto this
  • spamizbad 5y ago
    Schools do in fact have solitary confinement rooms. https://features.propublica.org/illinois-seclusion-rooms/school-students-put-in-isolated-timeouts/ https://features.propublica.org/illinois-seclusion-rooms/sch...
  • kiba 5y ago
    This doesn't seem to be a problem of race as far as I can tell but a kind of bureaucratic Kafkaesque face saving nightmare.
    • drewwwwww 5y ago
      in the event a white kid was even the suspected perpetrator of this, it's exceptionally unlikely he would be given a 90 day suspension on completely bunk evidence
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  My high school had a maximum of ten days for a suspension but ten absences during a semester was an automatic failure so there would no longer be any reason for the student to come to school. It was a sneaky way of expelling a student without actually going through the process of expelling them officially.
  • morpheuskafka 5y ago
    Ten days coming from the dicta in the Goss v. Lopez ruling to avoid greater constitutional scrutiny. If ten days led to an automatic failure, however, I doubt it would be considered minimal under that ruling anymore.
• to11mtm 5y ago
  Schools that do that sort of thing are the fucking worst. I'll go ahead and admit that I got bullied a lot at my first high school, for being a combination of gullable/fat/dorky as well as, for most of my time there, the only person of my skin color. My last day 'in' the school, I had my head slammed against a locker multiple times by a Starter of the Women's basketball team, and was later threatened with being shot by the Football QB. For retorting that "They'd pull the bullets out of you" to said QB (Mind you, I had all but recieved a concussion 2 hours prior) My family was first told that I was given an 'at home' suspension till the end of the semester. They told my parents that I could come back in-school next semester. However, it was not until the *end* of that first semester that they finally said 'actually, you'd have to stay home the rest of the year'. By that time, almost every school in the district was 2-4 weeks into their classes. There was no way I could get in. The second half of my Junior Year of High school, I instead had to take night classes with people who were either trying to get their GED, or were simply there because of some form of court order to get their GED (i.e. they weren't trying.) The ultimate irony of all of this, that first high school, I was a 'D+' student practically. The school I went to for my senior year, I actually wound up getting a B average for that year. Yeah. Some schools institutionally set people up for failure. In my case, it was because there was a HUGE scandal that erupted a year or two after I left; many of those Student athletes were having their tuition paid by third parties, more or less so that they could play for that school.
  • tester756 5y ago
    it's terrifying
  • bena 5y ago
    You mention tuition, was it a private school?
    • dylan604 5y ago
      How is this relevant? If it's a private school or public school, parents/schools are trying to juke the system to get the Ws on the scoreboards. If it's a private school or public, bullying is a thing. Someone being abused and then they are the ones to get the punishment when defending themselves by striking back is a complete bassackwards way of handling any problem like this.
• nabilhat 5y ago
  > At that point you're basically expelling the student. Worse than expelled. An expelled student can pick back up at another school far more easily than a student who remains enrolled, who would now have to waste time stepping through the voluntary transfer request process. Not that it would make a substantial difference in this case. Gwinnett County Public Schools covers an immense area. An expelled student is likely to end up in another GCPS school for lack of access to any other public schooling options. Long term "suspension" may be the only way to effectively expel a student from the district, if that was someone's goal.
• pyuser583 5y ago
  My local school district never “expels” anyone. They “suspend” then for two years (max). Apparently its because of a state law that defines “expulsion” and “suspension” in specific ways. “Expulsion” means the district has completely absolved itself of any educational responsibility to the student. “Suspension” means a students access to school facilities had been restricts or removed. In practice, formal expulsions are archaic. No one has been formally expelled for decades: including the student who raped multiple classmates in the stairwell. It’s a language thing, not a real thing.
  • lallysingh 5y ago
    How does expulsion play out with the school's finances?
    • pyuser583 5y ago
      It’s very, very expensive. The state constitution guarantees a right to an education. While it’s possible to deny someone that right based on poor behavior (like many other rights), it’s a big deal. If you mean does an expelled student mean reduced funding … I don’t know. Maybe nobody knows. It hasn’t happened in decades. When a student is suspended there’s usually some provision made for their education: individual learning. The district is still doing something for them. With expulsion, it’s as though the student is a non resident for purposes of registration. I don’t know if that applies to funding.
• smoldesu 5y ago
  Another fun punishment that far outweighed the crime, my Algebra teacher assigned me lunch detention in 7th grade for every day I didn't do my homework. I made it a grudge match, and ended up serving 181 total days of lunch detention that year. I barely passed, and on the last day of class he told me to never come back to his classroom. It was a helpful reminder at a young age that old people can be equally as petty (if not moreso) than young people.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I feel like there was plenty of pettiness on both sides here.
    • daniellarusso 5y ago
      Yes, except one was a 7th grader.
  • Zircom 5y ago
    As far as school punishments go this one seems a relatively benign and actually almost reasonable? You chose not to do the homework, so the teacher assigned you a mandatory time during which you could complete the homework without being distracted during lunch. From the details you provided,my understanding is you could've just completed it during lunch detention and that would've been the end of it, that seems pretty fair to me. You were aware of the consequences of not doing your homework and chose to continuously not do your assignments either at home or during the lunch period.
    • LegitShady 5y ago
      Because teachers have rotating lunch duties because it's often against their contract to make them work more than x lunches per week/month, while the child can be arbitrarily put in punishment for more than that. Just because he was aware of the punishment doesn't make the punishment appropriate. At some point the issue should be escalated or a compromise reached. Allowing to it go on for the majority of the school year is the teacher being unable to control the situation so taking it out on the student to the students detriment instead of benefit.
• cdsmith 5y ago
  Something's weird with that. Gwinnett County schools are out for the summer starting late next week. Most of the "three months" will be when school isn't in session, unless he was planning to attend summer school.
• duxup 5y ago
  Yeah I'm confused by how this played out. I'm familiar with my local public schools policies, outside violence / other crimes they don't even have the ability to hand out that long of a punishment by rule. No idea what that school is up to...
• Grieving 5y ago
  The kid is being accused of rape and mass murder threats, which seems like something the school should take seriously (although it does appear there may be serious issues with the evidence). They don't want him back there, but expulsion itself is strongly discouraged due to the "school-to-prison pipeline", so schools do weird things like this instead.