This is an emotion-tapping topic, though!
I agree with Brandon's comments below to the effect that we need to develop one-on-one, carefully tailored plans for students with behavioural problems and with deeper issues which are so often rooted in life outside of school.
This enters into a complex process, however, and requires a substantial commitment of staff and other resources. It may well require costly cooperative programs with various social services organizations (state, county, city, or NGOs?).
It seems to me that the crux of the issue is precisely this: we live in a time when the voters are electing folks who are shrinking budgets for both educaction and social services programs. Our government is growing the prison industry as fast as possible, with private corporations building and contracting to operate prisons around the country. Meanwhile, more and more wealthy people seem to be placing their children in private schools away from the rabble and rif-raff left in the public schools.
In my opinion, schools are a sorting mechanism, and are becoming more-so, not less-so. The political climate supports this role for schools, and those who support schools as educational institutions intimately linked with agencies dealing with the complexities of life outside the schoolyard are swimming upstream in a very strong current going the other way.
Right now, voters are electing people who emphasize prisons rather than public education, and who in fact favor private education over increasingly underfunded and undervalued public education.
Just my two cents worth at this point....
Gary Hoover
Kingfield
In a message dated 5/12/02 3:22:18 PM Central Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
When a student has disciplinary or any other kind of problem, the answer is
developing a one-on-one plan with that student to overcome the problem/obstacles.
The answer will never be to simply throw the student away either to a school
that has been ghettoized by lumping all "problem" students together or by simply
turning the student over to the juvenile INjustice system.
Schools are a lot cheaper to build, run, and maintain than jail cells. Treat
young people like criminals/delinquents and they will live up to our collective
expectations.
-Brandon Lacy Campos
-Powderhorn Park
-Candidate, Boad of Education
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
