After 15 years of reporting on education policy, I’ve realized that schools can’t win when it comes to student discipline.
Parents blast schools for being too lax or too harsh, depending on whether their child is the offended or the offender.
When their children are the victims, parents complain that the schools go easy on wrongdoers, troublemakers and bullies, and discipline policies are inconsistent, inadequate or ignored. Where, the parents ask, is zero tolerance?
When their children are the perpetrators, the parents complain punishments are draconian and the schools blindly follow policy without any consideration of mitigating facts. Where, the parents ask, is common sense?
It’s hard to evaluate parental laments about school discipline, because often you have only the parent’s side of the story; schools face legal limits on what they can reveal about a student.
I receive almost weekly emails from parents detailing how their kids were suspended without cause, wrongly accused of cheating or denied an honor/scholarship/position they rightfully deserved. Based on the information outlined by the parent, it certainly does sound like the school acted irrationally or irresponsibly.
And then, I take a closer look, and a seemingly simple issue becomes more complex. Seldom have I come across a case where the school didn’t have reasons for its decisions. I may not always agree with the school’s actions, but there’s a logic and a legitimacy to what it did.
The problem with taking a parent’s word for what occurred is that moms and dads accept their children’s version without a healthy dose of skepticism. The facts parents choose to believe often differ from those presented by the school or the official report.
A good example emerged last week in the saga of little Hunter Yelton, the spunky Colorado first grader suspended for purportedly just kissing a girl on the hand.
Under school policy, unwanted touching falls under sexual harassment, an allegation that Hunter’s mother understandably protested was overblown and misrepresented the innocence of her son’s peck.
“This is taking it to an extreme that doesn’t need to be met with a 6-year-old,” said mom Jennifer Saunders in an interview. She said the “little girl was fine with it. They are boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Talk radio, the blogosphere and TV pundits reacted with the predictable outrage and tirades about the idiocy of government schools. Where was the harm, they asked, in a 6-year-old kissing the hand of his first-grade crush?
A poster on my AJC Get Schooled blog opined, “Just when you are sure that the education establishment can’t get any more stupid and tone deaf to calls for some common-sense rules application … you read stuff like this. This is a gift to the home school, charter and private school movements.”
But then the mother of the little girl who was kissed came forward and said this was not a sandbox Romeo and Juliette. The kissing wasn’t harmless, but part of an ongoing pattern of harassment that upset her young daughter.
On Facebook, parent Jade Masters-Ownbey said the kissing had become frequent. “Not once, but over and over … not with her permission, but sneaking up on her … not without warning and consequences prior to suspension,” she said.
She said her daughter was so alarmed, her older brother felt compelled to try to protect his little sister from Hunter and another boy in the class who “kept her from playing with other kids and fought with each other. After they got in trouble, one boy stopped, but the other boy apparently didn’t get it. I had to put restrictions on her about who she was allowed to be around at school. I’ve had to coach her about what to do when you don’t want someone touching you, but they won’t stop.”
The sexual harassment charge on Hunter’s record may have gone too far, which the school district conceded by downgrading it to “misconduct.”
While it’s easy to get kissed off at schools when they overreact and they sometimes do, we ought to remember that most parents support zero tolerance and “get-tough” policies.
Until it’s their child.
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