I guess we have to talk about cellphones again.

Actually, we need to talk about cops in school, euphemistically called School Resource Officers, as if they were a librarian or something.  This is a bit of a rant, in case you didn't realize.

This came across Facebook.

Sadly, there was a time when kids were taught to respect adults, in general. I work with some amazing teachers, but parents show open disrespect for teachers, so why should their kids be any different? todays parents are so over involved with their kid...

Total and utter bullshit.

"That time when kids were taught to respect their elders" and things were rosy and happy and nobody sassed an adult ... didn't exist except in the fevered dreams of people who think they weren't Royal Pains in the Ass themselves when they were teenagers.

"Back then" kids were just as disrespectful and just as stupid about it. The difference between then and now was that a teacher who made harsh and unreasonable demands could arbitrarily smack a kid - corporal punishment was pretty common - and there was nothing the kid could do. The teacher could be totally and completely wrong and all of society would just fall in line. After the teacher got done slapping or spanking, the parents would probably deal out more punishment when the kid got home, "No Respect for Authority."

After the Tinker decision and other lawsuits, schools began to realize that they didn't have complete and total control of their students and never did, that "students' rights didn't stop at the schoolhouse door", that the Constitution and (in the case under discussion here) specifically, the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments weren't just for adults.

Kids are citizens, too, and have all of those pesky constitutional rights. Smacking them around for looking at a text (the modern day equivalent of passing a note) is ridiculous. Expecting them to hand over a phone to a teacher who will search through it or not give it back until some unknown time ... is likewise unreasonable if you only do it to one student and only when you catch her and only if you're in a bad mood because your day wasn't going well. If you want to apply discipline, you have to be fair and equitable.

Teachers who do something creative, like having the students line up their phones on the "chalktray", have a much better record because it's done to everyone and becomes a habit. Kids can deal with that.

What they hate is the "I'm annoyed, therefore you are wrong and I'm taking your phone because reasons and if you question my AUTHORITAH, I will have you arrested."

Why does the teacher need to make this an issue? All accounts say the teacher asked her to put away the cellphone but she didn't do it fast enough (emphasis mine). How does this justify a harsh takedown by a cop, public arrest, jail and fines? Any teacher/admin/cop/adult who escalates this to the level in that video really needs to take a few psych courses, and do some serious introspective work ... is that student really threatening you that much? Is the student use of a cellphone anywhere near the disruption that the policeman caused?

Nowadays, schools try to slide past the Constitution by using weasel words and police phrasing and lingo to attempt to do this crap. We changed from "Inappropriate Language or Behavior" to "Assault", "Bullying" or "Harassment" ... or my favorite response to one boy shoving another at a locker, "ASSAULT and BATTERY, Third Degree."

The kid who recorded the incident was also arrested ... for "Causing a Distraction." WTF, people?

Then, there's the kid who recorded the video on her cellphone: she was also arrested ... for "Causing a Distraction." So a cop in the room who takes a girl forcibly from her chair and throws her against a wall and handcuffs her -- that's not a distraction but a second kid with a phone is? I can assure you that my difficulty keeping the class on task would have a lot more to do with the cop than anything else.

We see this all the time as schools struggle to pretend they're Gods of All They Survey. A girl wears spandex leggings and the administrator calls it "a Safety Issue." It's not.

A kid wears a hat and we call it "Disrepect" and if the kid doesn't take it off instantly it becomes "Refusal To Follow Orders" or "Insubordination" or "Disruption". It's not.

A kid gives an Advil to another kid because of PMS, we call it "Illegal Drug Distribution" or invoke some "No Tolerance Drug Policy" as if that applied here. It doesn't.

South Carolina even has a law against disrupting school, a law that carries a punishment of 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted.  "Disruption" used to be shooting spitballs and the punishment was a detention. Now it's a major criminal offense if you want to push it that far.

Police need to use specific, precise language that has been scrubbed of as much bias and humanity as possible because they are dealing with adults and a criminal justice system. If the police get involved, there are serious consequences if guilt is proven.

When the situation calls for jail time or extensive fines, we absolutely must call the police. This is not something untrained school personnel can handle. Anything you say can be used against you in court; you have the right to an attorney; you have the right to remain silent. The policemen can use DEADLY force if public safety is at stake.

The "School Resource Officer" is still a cop. Every interaction with a student is written up, recorded and reported. He is not a friend and he cannot ignore things.

The other 99.9% of the time, school discipline is not at that point and the cops should not be involved. Schools need to get out of the policeman's mindset, to remove that language from our speech and discipline policies.

We are not cops; we are dealing with children, actually and legally.

Passing notes in class, while rude and should be dealt with by school officials, is NOT a criminal offense. Cops should not be involved.

I don't want kids handing out Advil  - there are medical reasons. So I send them to the office/nurse to get some for free (where the nurse can say "That's enough for today" or "Is there something I need to know about that bruising all over your body? Know that I am required by law to call the state abuse hotline.") This kid in this case is nothing for a policeman to deal with. The abuser, yes.

"If all you've got is a cop ... everyone looks like a criminal" isn't quite accurate, really. He's required to treat every interaction as a possible criminal case; he has no choice. He is a policeman and he must follow rules.

"If a major incident occurs that needs the US Justice System, we'll call the cops"
became
"The SRO is there to deal with major incidents."

But that has become

"We pay him $90,000 dollars a year and he's not doing anything else right now,
so we'll send him to do this task we don't feel like doing."

and in some cases:
"The kid won't listen to us. SRO, you take care of it."

And that's how passing notes becomes a criminal offense. That's how refusing to hand over a phone can lead to forcible takedown, arrest, and jail time.

School administrations have increasingly becoming a cadre of self-important fools who have never taught a day in their lives and who have no idea what they're doing. 

A Professional relationship or a personal one?

Has the administration abdicated its responsibility to teach behavior and self-discipline to a policeman who must follow completely different and far stricter rules of interpersonal contact? I think so.

Here's a thought: If your SRO is expected to be a friendly guy, messing with kids and always has a smile ... do the kids know he is really a cop? Is the disrespect some claim as a reason for the arrest partly because kids have been calling him by his first name all this time?  Does he have a professional relationship with the students or a personal one?

A final point. Some reports claim the girl was recently orphaned. This is not true, but she was in foster care ... still a traumatic and depressing situation for a girl whose mother and grandmother are still alive. Think about what kind of home life that girl has lived. It doesn't excuse, but it does explain.

Thanks for reading. I've got to get back to work.

---

p.s.
Anyone who wants to claim that the cop is there to protect the students from a "Bad Guy With a Gun", please just shut the fuck up and crawl back into your hole ... you have no idea what you're talking about.

Cops in school cause changes.

But not the changes everyone was hoping for.

Police are police. They've been trained in a certain way to do a job that is more often than not dealing with criminals, very often dangerous as hell, and involves the chance (remote though it may be) that the officer will have to use his weapon to kill someone. To keep checks and balances aligned, police operate under strict rules and the laws are written to protect the innocent, etc.

Students are not criminals. Students are not committing "assault" but rather are "horsing around".  Johnny didn't commit "assault and battery", he hit Jack because Jack said his mother was fat and neither boy was serious.

When the administration gives up its responsibility and hands over discipline to the police, then you have created a bad place. Putting a school under police patrol changes the attitude, mood and responses of the administration in the 99.995% of the day that doesn't involve actions serious to warrant police action. The rest of the time? That hired gun wouldn't do jack squat.

From NYTimes, via Joanne Jacobs:

Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.
. . . “There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”

Joanne:

In the wake of Newtown, many districts are hiring police officers to guard schools. But once they’re on campus, cops usually end up enforcing discipline. We are criminalizing our children for nonviolent offenses,” Wallace B. Jefferson, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, said in a speech to the Legislature in March.

And you wonder why the kids don't take the administration all that seriously. It has abdicated in favor of the guy with the gun.

When a 14-year-old boy “angrily” threw a football at another boy’s leg, middle school officials called the police, who arrested the boy for assault. The other boy was not injured. There was no real explanation as to why the incident was considered serious enough to involve police. The police report states that the unnamed juvenile suspect appeared “angry.”

No Cops in Schools - Admin, Do Your Jobs

Admin + Cop = Idiot

"A story about one 5-year-old particularly stands out. The little boy was required to wear black shoes to school. Because he didn't have black shoes, his mom used a marker to cover up his white and red sneakers. A bit of red and white was still noticeable, so the child was taken home by the cops. The child was escorted out of school so he and his mother would be taught a lesson."

Really?

"Students playfully throwing peanuts at one another on a school bus ended in five black male high school students being arrested for felony assault after one of the peanuts hit the white female bus driver."

Well, that IS a problem.

I guess.

It's simple. Combine stupid with racist, add in administration that is way too full of itself and stir with a ladle of cop-speak and you get this. Administrative Over-Reaction and a No-Tolerance/No-Intelligence Discipline policy.

Keep the police officers out of schools.  Call them in when you need to have someone arrested, certainly, but don't make them the first-response to student horseplay and childish antics.

Force the administration to do their jobs properly or fire them. Discipline should stay within the boundaries of the school building.

Don't even get started with the whole gun thing.

Link: lawsuit

Fines for Truancy, by people with too much time on their hands.

I doubt that the fines for truants program will work.  As soon as you get money involved, excuses will be found in much the same way as excuses are found when students and families want to take an extended vacation or take an extra week for Spring break. Besides, if the parents couldn't make them go to school in the first place, how are they supposed to make them go to school in the second place?

Bad boy. Stop it.

It could soon cost kids (and parents) in Concord,CA upwards of $500 if the teenager continues to cut class. The mayor of Concord, Laure Hoffmeister, insists that the local police are spending too much time and effort chasing down truant kids these days.

So instead of chasing them down and bringing them back to school, they'll chase them down and give them a ticket, show up in court, give testimony, watch as the judge waves his gavel and threatens to impose the fine but never does, listen to the kid do that pretend-contrition-bullshit thing they're all so good at, and then tell the parent to bring them back to school. Because, gosh darn it, they're all such GOOD kids.

“Often they’re finding that the kid they return at 11 a.m. is back out at 12:30,” said Hoffmeister. After a series of general warnings, students and their parents would be fined $100 after the first offense, $200 after the second, and $500 after the third.

And this solves things, how?  The school has already admitted it can't keep them in the building for longer than a couple hours.

Darren has a few other implications that I won't repeat in their entirety, but just say that the schools seem to be are demanding more and more control over students' off-campus lives but accepting less and less responsibility.

On the whole, adults in the area seem to largely support the innovative and unique idea. Predictably, teenagers and students are vehemently opposed to the new proposal.

Quel surprise. The adults approve a measure that restricts teenagers. I wonder how long the ordinance will last. Probably until someone in local government has to pay the fine. This whole sorry tale brings to mind this:

Americans have long been driven by two deep longings. The first is to be left alone. The second is to tell other people what to do. On most moral issues, the easiest way out is to inflict our piety on children. All the righteous satisfaction, none of the libertarian backlash.

~ William Saletan, Slate

Won't someone PLEASE think of the Children?

Bullying is cause for Expulsion

I await the results of California's foray into social science, to whit, the new law making cyberbullying punishable by expulsion.

The bill, know as AB 746, or the Cyber Bully Prevention bill, was championed by Assemblymember Nora Campos (D-San José). It has become official California law following Governor Brown’s signature. AB 746 declares that posts made on social network sites are covered under the Education Code anti-bullying provisions and allows school officials to suspend student violators. California law allows for the suspension of a student for bullying, including bullying by electronic acts.

I'm assuming they've figured out

• how to identify the true culprit from other than circumstantial evidence. I, for example, have two facebook accounts and I recommend that students and teachers do as well. One is my squeaky-clean page, the other is anonymous. There are easy ways to set up a blog or a facebook account without much of a trail.  Police can figure it out with a judge's warrant and a bucketload of time but probably have more things on their mind than Suzy calling Jenny a "whore-slut" online. A smart kid posts the nasty, waits for reaction and then deletes it. A smarter kid posts "Hey, did you hear about what Jenny did?" The smartest bully gets everyone to unfriend the victim and bullies in the old-fashioned way by shouting things when adults aren't around.
• how to deal with a bully who just shuts up and whose parents get a lawyer. What? Did you expect any different? Are you going to subpoena something? Got some proof it was my client? His account got "hacked" and he would never write that. It didn't work for Weiner but it would for a nameless 10th grader.  Don't forget due process laws, confidentiality rules and all that.  How do you deal with accounts set to "private".  What, are they going to require accounts and passwords from every student or "friend" them all?

  

  Bullies are everywhere. The harder you look, the more you'll find.

• how to deal with the natural school administration tendency of reading a law and then interpreting everything as being applicable from the most minor to the most major. The Sledgehammer Effect.
• how to deal with the ever-slippery slope of the word "bullying" and the growing tendency of teenagers to be offended (mostly because the counselors in their lives are so anxious to tell them they are.). 
• how expulsion will help. The recent case in Massachusetts would not have been helped by expulsion of the major parties. They would simply have become more antagonistic and less public, making the situation spiral out of control that much faster.   A minor issue blown up to a major one does not resolve the issue. A major issue blown up to an expulsion case pushes the problem out of the hands of the school but doesn't solve it.
• how the same officious twerps who can't deal with problems themselves but are always running to the police (euphemistically called "School Resource Officers")  are going to deal with social media and modern technology. Hell, mine can't even set up surveymonkey polls without help.
• how to suspend or expel an already expelled student (repeat offender) or one who is not currently in school, whether graduated or bullies from one school and victims in another -- which school officials are involved?

My biggest complaint is that I can't see that school officials have jurisdiction here, but maybe this law circumvents that pesky Constitutional problem. If the kids can't get on Facebook during the day at school, then all of this must be happening at home.  This makes it a parental problem calling for a parental solution.  If the issue escalates beyond what the parents can or will handle, then it becomes a civil problem. If it escalates further, it becomes a criminal problem.

recently, the third Judicial Court

issued two simultaneous opinions to resolve how much control high schools may exercise over their students’ off-campus, online speech. In Layshock v. Hermitage School District and J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, the judges held that school officials cannot, “reach into a child’s home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that it can control that child when he/she participates in school sponsored activities.”  In the two respective cases, students had been disciplined for creating MySpace profiles intended to mock their principals.  The Third Circuit ruled that schools cannot punish students’ online speech simply because it is vulgar, lewd, or offensive.

In my interpretation, if speech rises beyond that limit, as bullying can do, then it becomes a civil or criminal offense but, again, not a scholastic one. Schools are spectacularly ill-equipped to handle this issue.


Two anecdotes that color my thinking.

A says to B "That's so gay." and kid C overhears it and is convinced by counselors to be offended and everybody is called to the office, meetings with parents and kids happen, and everyone is thoroughly frustrated and it only makes the matter worse because it was only an off-hand comment in the first place. Over-reaction is all too common and makes minor matters worse and makes major bullies more retractable.

It is much better handled low-key as I witnessed about two months ago. A good friend of mine is a teacher up north and he is openly gay. Because he is my friend and he commented, the conversation appeared in my facebook feed. I saw a comment by a kid saying "That's gay!" in the normal, stupid way. My friend replied "Ahem." The kid instantly retracted it and apologized profusely, promising not to repeat the mistake. Simply done, effective and long-lasting.

Ingenious Solution - except for those who didn't pack their own bags.

The Grouchy Old Cripple had a thought:

FINALLY - A great alternative to body scanners at airports ...

The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports. It's a booth you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you. They see this as a win-win for everyone, with no crap about racial profiling. It also would eliminate the costs of long and expensive trials. Justice would be swift. Case closed!

You're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system . . . "Attention standby passengers - we now have a seat available on flight number XXXX. Shalom"

"Have your bags been in your possession since the time you packed them?"
"Yes."
"Have a nice day."

The Single Funniest Lede in History

Right from the front page of the Rutland Herald (VT) ...

When David Belock's car went missing, he told state police he suspected the men who delivered cocaine to his house on a weekly basis may have been responsible.

But wait, it gets better. How? Well, a man was found driving it. (There was also a passenger from Brooklyn) The driver claimed he didn't know the man in the other seat nor where the car had come from, but

When he arrived at his home, he found the man from Brooklyn in his house and the car parked in his driveway. He decided to go to the store and noticed the keys were in the ignition so he decided to take the car to the Grand Union supermarket.

And, all this time, I thought the New York Post made this kind of stuff up.
(story by Brent Curtis, Rutland Herald)

Don’t expect schools to be cyber-parents

My response is: anything but "F"
But then, I'm a teacher and I don't believe that anything happening outside of the school or non-school related activity or trip is any of the school's business.

Via the Schenectady (NY) Daily Gazette
July 6, 2010, page A5

A boy has apparently sent filthy text messages to your daughter over the weekend. Both are sixth-graders at the same school. You, the girl’s father, coach sports with the boy’s father. What would you do?

a. Disconnect your daughter from all texting services.
b. Talk to the boy’s father, whom you know.
c. If the father refuses to do something about it, stop socializing with him.
d. Call the police.
e. Do some combination of a, b, c and d.
f. Complain to the school principal.

This is a real-life example, and the parents chose only f. The two students attended Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J. The principal, Tony Orsini, asked the girl’s parents whether they had contacted the boy’s family. No. That would upset the coaching arrangement. He asked whether they had called the police. They again said no, making several excuses.

In olden days, the parents probably would have intervened personally. They could have cut off their daughter’s texting capabilities and diplomatically called the other parents. Or they might have gone directly to the door of the offending schoolmate’s house to make their displeasure very clear.

The more aggressive approach is best done with calm. The parents may have had no idea of their child’s activities and would be grateful for the information. Or, the odious messages may have come from someone else who had found the cell phone. That had happened in the above case.

But outsourcing this parenting role to teachers and principals seems to have become the common practice.

Most schools understandably don’t have the time or desire to monitor their charges’ electronic communications. And what’s a school to do when one student sends obscene texts to another from home on a weekend? Obtain a search warrant?

Suppose the principal confiscates a cell phone and finds provocative photos of the owner on it, not uncommon for those who do “sexting.” The educator risks having an unhinged parent retaliate by charging him (or her) of trafficking in child pornography.

Schools have come up with varied responses to the cyber-bully problem. A Seattle middle school suspended 28 students who ganged up on a classmate on Facebook. By contrast, a mother asked a school in Fairfax, Va., to punish students involved in a Facebook pile-up on her son and was told there was nothing it could do.

My favorite response was Principal Orsini’s. He sent an e-mail to all parents that described their responsibilities.

“There is absolutely NO reason for any middle school student to be part of a social networking site,” Orsini wrote. He noted that cruel 12-year-olds pose more a threat to their middle-schoolers’s well-being than the adult predators of parental nightmares. And he told parents whose children were attacked through networking sites or messages: “IMMEDIATELY GO TO THE POLICE!”

Typing these words, I feel like reaching for the hand sanitizer. You who have hung in this far may feel similar revulsion. You wonder why any sixth-grader has texting privileges at all. Why parents let their tender-age teens do social networking. Why Facebook opens its service to people as young as 13.

There are ways to pressure Facebook. Parents, meanwhile, must do their job. They must confront the parents of their children’s assailants, contain their kids’ computer use and, if necessary, call the police.

In the NFL, it's called taunting.

Joanne Jacobs has the story of an angry boy arrested for throwing a football.

When a 14-year-old boy “angrily” threw a football at another boy’s leg, middle school officials called the police, who arrested the boy for assault. The other boy was not injured. There was no real explanation as to why the incident was considered serious enough to involve police. The police report states that the unnamed juvenile suspect appeared “angry.”

What happened here is still unclear. At first blush, this administration (HIPsters obviously) over-reacted. Upon further reflection and some limited research, I've decided the administration over-reacted badly. I can see no instance or set of circumstances that would justify having this kid arrested.

The HIPPIE (Highly Ineffective Principal, Possibly Idiotic Even) reminds me of the police officer in D.C. who drew his gun when he car was hit by a snowball: Child has tantrum. Elder is offended. Elder instantly escalates to the extreme. Don't forget to make the "offense" sound really dark and evil by calling it "assault."

I'm also amused that "Crittenden Middle School Principal Karen Robinson did not respond to phone calls by press time." Seeing as this incident happened on Friday and the paper was the Monday edition, she certainly had time. Must be hiding something.

Should have dropped a penalty flag for "Unsportsmanlike conduct" and left it at that.

It's about time. Laws against texting and Driving

The NY Times reports on legislation in Utah which harshly penalizes people who cause fatal car accidents while texting. Instead of merely facing a fine, offenders may now get up to 15 years in jail — the same as drunk drivers.

"In effect, a crash caused by such a multitasking motorist is no longer considered an 'accident' like one caused by a driver who, say, runs into another car because he nodded off at the wheel. Instead, such a crash would now be considered inherently reckless. 'It's a willful act,' said Lyle Hillyard, a Republican state senator and a big supporter of the new measure. 'If you choose to drink and drive or if you choose to text and drive, you're assuming the same risk.' The Utah law represents a concrete new response in an evolving debate among legislators around the country about how to reduce the widespread practice of multitasking behind the wheel — a topic to be discussed at a national conference about the dangers of distracted driving that is being organized by the Transportation Department for this fall."

But Officer, The House Jumped in Front of Me

Good Morning, Sunshine.

"Police say speed was a factor in a Route 103 crash where a Charlestown, N.H., man crashed his car into a house, according to state police. Criminal and civil charges are being considered in the crash ... drove his Subaru Forester into an unoccupied house at around 2 a.m. Monday, destroying the car and causing "significant" damage to the home."

Speed was a factor? Ummmm, wouldn't "stupidity" and "can't drive worth a lick" be more accurate?

Speed Traps save lives.

Apparently some residents were tired of speeders ...

The group, Angry Neighbors With Paintball Guns, posted signs at strategic locations throughout the city, warning motorists to slow down or risk being shot at with a paintball gun.

The group does not say if the signs are meant to serve only as an attention-grabber or if it plans to shoot paintballs at vehicles.

I'm Conflicted. What if the speeders shoot back with a paintball gun of their own? Enjoy the mayhem or worry about the repercussions from the first angry Lexus owner with a Smith and Wesson?

Hell. I'm going with "Enjoy it."

Drinking age discussion

I found this in the local paper and thought I'd bring up the topic.

Prohibition, then and now
September 25, 2008
By John M. McCardell Jr.

As a former college president who is all too familiar with the damage alcohol can inflict on the health and safety of young adults, I was intrigued to run across the observations of noted psychologist A.A. Brill as reported in The New York Times. Dr. Brill noted "that more people are drinking who never used to drink, that moderate drinkers have become heavy ones, that former drinkers of beer and light wine are drinking whiskey, brandy, gin, raw alcohol and other concentrated spirits."

That Dr. Brill's thoughts were reported by the Times in 1926, and referred to the effects of Prohibition on otherwise sober citizens does nothing to lessen my impression that they constitute an apt summary of the kinds of adverse effects produced by the modern-day equivalent of Prohibition - the federal mandate that establishes the legal drinking age at 21.

On Sept. 26, it will have been 75 years since the citizens of Vermont voted overwhelmingly to repeal the 18th Amendment, which had supplied the constitutional authority for Prohibition - a bold and misguided experiment intended to end the consumption of alcohol in this country.

Vermont's shared border with Canada made the state popular with smugglers, who transported illegal alcohol in vehicles with secret storage compartments, using smoke screens to conceal their activities. On Lake Champlain, liquor-laden submarine barges were towed just below the water's surface from the Canadian border headed for secret destinations in Vermont and New York. A Washington Post story reported on a Vermont senator, who was accidentally shot by Prohibition agents in 1924 and subsequently suffered dizzy spells as a result of his wounds.

After more than a decade, even Prohibition's initial supporters had had enough. In 1933, lopsided votes in favor of repeal in state after state ultimately sounded Prohibition's death knell.

But 51 years later a self-appointed moral majority led by Mothers Against Drunk Driving persuaded Congress to enact the National Legal Drinking Age Act of 1984. Once again, the federal government effectively usurped the power of the states to regulate alcohol, stipulating that any state with a legal drinking age lower than 21 risked the loss of 10 percent of its federal highway funds.

And how has this modern reprise of Prohibition worked out? Badly.

In the same way that the speakeasies of the 1920s and '30s functioned as havens where alcohol could be consumed out of the sight of enforcement officials, today's young adults frequent fraternity house basements and other hideaways where they engage in furtive binge drinking. There, suspended above a keg, tap in mouth, feet in the air, young people chug beer to the chants and cheers of fellow partygoers, and engage in games of Beer Pong, Kings, Flip Cup, and Beirut, whose foremost purpose is to get contestants drunk as quickly as possible. Private homes and college dorm rooms serve as venues for "pre-gaming," in which young people under the legal drinking age consume large amounts of alcohol in a short period of time in order to become and remain sufficiently intoxicated to spend a night moving from party to party.

It is no surprise that substantial numbers of these young adults become victims of alcohol poisoning, serious bodily injury, sexual abuse and worse. As with Prohibition, legal age 21 has had the predictable effect of worsening the problem it was intended to solve. Trying to eliminate an ingrained social behavior by legislative fiat simply does not work, as we should have learned from Prohibition. Such ill-advised policies simply drive the consumption of alcohol from public view, significantly increasing the hazards that irresponsible drinking imposes on the health and safety of us all.

The repeal of Prohibition and the return of jurisdiction for the regulation of alcohol consumption to the states drastically reduced the incentive to participate in the dangerous behaviors that accompanied the furtive consumption of alcohol spawned by speakeasies. We could profit by following this path.

Young adults should be treated as such, even when it comes to alcohol. If we devise ways to educate them about alcohol consumption in a broad way that goes beyond temperance lectures and scary messages about brain damage, we can certify that they have reached a level of understanding that qualifies them to exercise adult judgment.

We should reconsider the bad law and poor social policy that allow these problems to fester in the shadows. We do ourselves no favors by relegating drinking by any age group to the dark corners of society where the effects of risky behaviors remain unobserved and unaddressed until it is too late to do much about them.

Running Man Redux

We had our first runners the other day. Yup, second day of school and they're walking down the street to the mall, instead of showing up to Basic Algebra.

The AP pops in and asks if I'm missing anyone. I reply in the affirmative and she says "They were spotted heading uptown." Of course, now I'm thinking to myself, "Then why did you ask me if I was missing anyone if you already knew that they were gone? Is this your idea of a clever trap or something? Yes, I'm awake, yes I took roll, yes the class just started 2 minutes ago, so I'm not worried about missing kids yet. They're usually in her office complaining about stupid things so we've gotten used to latecomers everyday."

Sheesh.

Small Town Teaching

Or, Seeing your students in the paper, 5 years later ...

The highlights: in a restaurant at 5am, stole booze and a cash register (with $10 in change) then drank the booze and passed out in the kitchen. 0.17 BAC. Also stole jewelry from a local home a few days before.

felony burglary and misdemeanor petty larceny, petty larceny for jewelry
maximum penalty of more than 16 years behind bars and $2,500 in fines if convicted of the three charges.

I never had trouble with this kid, just not very motivated, not very likable or willing to be someone other than his history. He'd come in, do the minimum or less. Pass or fail, he didn't really care. Some kids are like that. He dropped out of my algebra 1 as I recall. Took it with another teacher. I'll have to look it up. 16 years seems a awfully long time for B&E, though.