When we were kids, the best way to avoid punishment for doing something stupid was to get as many kids involved as possible. They can't possibly suspend a whole class, right? Maybe Dekaney High School in Houston, Texas, needs to do that.
The school that made national news last spring for a fight that sent students to the hospital is back in the news for ... you guessed it ... another brawl. Thanks to video captured by a student's cellphone, parents are getting a look at chaos in the cafeteria that looks more like something you'd see in a TV show about a prison riot than in a high school. So many kids are flailing about, it looks like the entire room full of kids is involved.
Scary, right?
Parents across the country are more or less calling for heads on a platter down in Texas. And Dekaney parents are calling for the school to be shut down (yeah, really), but watching it all unfold, all I could think was: where does this school even begin to start weeding out the bad eggs?
Think about it! I see a bunch of teenage hoodlums walking down the street who are acting ... suspicious, and I've been known to walk in the other direction. Call me a judgey old biddy, but I also call myself safe. Teenagers are old enough, big enough, and strong enough to do some real damage should they want to (and I don't do this based on race or every time I see kids ... there are just some groups of kids you can tell are "up to no good").
Now consider what school administrators have to deal with. You put a whole bunch of these miscreants in one place, and there's safety in numbers: safety for the kids. Being an adult only means so much to kids who are hellbent on creating chaos. They've already lost respect for you when they turn the cafeteria into their own special fight club. Or -- more likely -- their parents haven't instilled respect for elders in them to begin with.
So what's a school to do? They've already staggered bell schedules and "increased communication" between kids and students at Dekaney. But all this pussyfooting around punishment isn't going to help. At this point there's just one choice: put it on the parents. Take each kid involved, one by one, and throw them out on their ear.
Schools need to get to a point where they put the safety of their students ahead of the attempts to fill in where parents have failed. If that means suspending or expelling whole classrooms at a time, so be it. Somehow kids need to get the message that the world is not their personal playground. And if it takes some bitter medicine, so be it.
What would you do to these kids to set them straight?
Image via sports and social/Flickr