Student Rights vs. Student Safety
By Malken

The following was first submitted my Miss Malken :

"If you take all the potatoes, I’m gonna get you."

"The potato menace," as it has come to be known, was uttered by a boy of 12 named Michael in a Louisiana middle school lunch line. After being turned in by the lunch lady, Michael was summarily suspended, and then brought before a local judge who locked him up for making "terroristic threats." In May, he spent more than two weeks incarcerated in a juvenile detention center.
We read in The Boston Globe, Wednesday August 4 that, "counter to the widespread public impression," a CDC study shows significant decline in the amount of violence committed by teenagers since the early 1990’s. In light of this fact, the recent trend toward high-strung school discipline practice seems not only illogical but also dangerous, creating a stifling atmosphere that actually fosters the violent outburst everyone fears most. Yet as politicians and school staffers struggle to stave off accusations of inaction in the wake of Littleton, such reactions are proliferating, even in sensible and sober Massachusetts. When kids head back to school in a few weeks, it will be in everyone’s best interest not to allow the flood of paranoia that characterized May and June to flow over into September.

"Throughout my 12 years of public and private schooling, there had not been a day when I have felt unsafe. Now I don't feel safe. My school is…planning on having armed police officers at our high school graduation. [By keeping rebellious instincts under the surface]…we are inviting kids to try harder - to make it bigger."
Melissa, Oregon

Toward the end of last year, a Cape Cod middle school teacher overheard a student named Ethan taking part in a conversation about Columbine. Someone mentioned that there was a boy in a neighboring town who wore trench coats like the one worn by Littleton shooter Eric Harris, and Ethan said, "maybe everyone should wear a trench-coat." Later in the day, the same teacher overheard him say that a boy was "on his list." Ethan had not meant "hit-list" but rather its off-color, rhyming companion list, a document we all have somewhere in the recesses of our minds. He hadn’t wanted to use the S-word because he knew an adult was listening. The teacher immediately started legal and disciplinary action: Ethan was questioned by police and suspended indefinitely.
Schools across the Commonwealth are banning trench coats and black clothing in general; at the ACLUM, this was the single most commonly reported issue of the April-June quarter. Even if a rule were on the books prohibiting such styles, it would be unconstitutional: it could serve no purpose other than "to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint." Tinker v. Des Moines, 393 US 503 (1969). There is usually no such rule, however, and without one, such punishments are even more offensive. Students have no way to know if they are violating some unspoken stricture of the school authorities. This set-up also sets the stage for unequal or capricious enforcement. It is only too easy to imagine a principal who detains only the trench-coat-wearing students he has already marked as delinquent.
Such cases are indeed ominous and discomforting, but in some ways more sinister are the efforts to use the shootings as a catalyst for entirely irrelevant restrictions on students’ free expression. To take restrictions on a student’s clothes or hair color to be the moral equivalent of restrictions on firearms is not only insulting, but actively contributes to the repressive environment that led to the tragedy in Colorado. Yet the governor himself wrote a school-uniform bill after the Columbine shootings that is being pushed as a bona fide response to the baser instincts of Massachusetts’ savage middle schoolers.
What’s more, as seditious as the "message" of baggy jeans may be, there is no substitute for actual speech, and a state senator has accordingly filed a bill (SB 219) prohibiting any clothes or speech that an individual school administrator may consider "obscene" or "disruptive." Neither term is defined in the legislation. This law could be used to censor stories and poetry in school-sponsored literary magazines, theater productions, anything with the school’s name on it. Even without this legislation, a student on the South Shore was summarily suspended after Columbine for a work he had written in a playwriting class prior to the shooting, in which students plan to blow up school and kill themselves. The author had no history of violence or discipline problems, and his characters do not actually blow up the school in the play. A third party administrator punished him retroactively for work that legitimately fulfilled a school assignment; the precedent for academic freedom is chilling at the very least. The bill’s "disruption and disorder" clause could also be used to crack down on the "class clown," or to deal harshly with clothes counter to an administrator’s sensibilities, such "Co-ed Naked" or rock music T-shirts, both subjects of past ACLUM lawsuits.

"I feel that I am now going to school in a prison. [After an anonymous threat of violence,] administration only frisked certain people. Next year, there is a possibility of a dress code and the wearing of identification cards…A lot of students don't feel comfortable now."
Courtney, Western MA

Four kids in Arkansas were overheard talking about what it would be like if someone brought a gun to their school; they were taken to a police station and strip-searched without their parents’ knowledge; three were expelled and the fourth suspended. A 14-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was strip-searched and suspended for two weeks from her school because during a classroom discussion about the Colorado shootings she said she could understand how unpopular students could be pushed so far that they would lash out violently.
In ways like this, strict school officials create the same environment that was the breeding ground for Littleton’s troubles: one in which students are punished for venting their frustrations or expressing their differences in a public forum. Order will be maintained only when students are free to question that order, and to engage their teachers and peers without fear of reprisal.
Adam Teicholz is a college student and Lexington resident. He is a summer intern at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Source
http://www.aclu-mass.org/archives/schoolparanoia.html

Malken's Comments

I was a student at Bob Jones High School Madison, Alabama. The keyword here is WAS. I quit. After, without due process not exactly being suspended but being told "don't come back until you have a note from you psyciatrist". I got the note, I never came back.

There was no excuse for what I did. I shouldn't have had a tantrum. I was wearing black lipstick. A vice-principal told me to take it off. I should have, but didn't. I yelled. I threw a notebook. I walked down the hall and refused to talk to him. I was over-reacting, big time. I like to think i'm a reasonable person. I wasn't then.

However, they threatened to have me arrested. They sent me home that day. They didn't say whether I was suspended or expelled. They just said go. The next day when I returned they said someone had phonedd in that I had a gun.(needless to say, I did not) My problem wasn't that they searched me, my problem was they didn't search me. They just sent me back untill I had a note from a mental health professional saying I could. Not only did I not have due process, I didn't get any process.

I didn't have a history of serious disciplinary problems untill after the Columbine shooting. I had already been suspended(?) for the last month of my eighth grade year for having a "list". (I said Shit list not Hitlist). Well, no disciplinary problems if you didn't count being suspended for having green hair, and walking out of my first period class and leaving school in protest once.

What did I do wrong on that second day? What had I done wrong all along? I wore black. I listened to the wrong kind of music. I sat alone at lunch. I was contstantly harassed by other students and by the faculty. They fucked with me and then feared I would retaliate. I was wronged not once but twice.

P.S. My therapist says I'm more likely to kill myself than anyone else.

Links

• Tinker v. DesMoines, 395 US 503 (1969)
• Pediatricians urge a Ban on spanking in Schools
• Student Rights in Public High Schools
• School weapons ban vague, court rules
• My So-called Rights
• A prime example of how media creates the problem
• The Real Trenchcoat Mafia is our GOVERNMENT
• More of the Safety and less rights page?
• SUBGENIUS PAGE on trenchcoat Mafia
• For you Illuminatists , A conspiracy theory!

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This Report is solely a work of non-fiction, but those skeptics, we're not twisting your arm to believe Anything. Just everything - or Nothing!