12-year-old girl arrested for doodling in class
No, that’s not an Onion headline, and yes – it is completely outrageous. According to CNN:
There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10
” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.
Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.
Alexa’s hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and — the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl — her classmates.
“They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn’t believe it,” Alexa recalled. “I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person.”
Alexa is no longer facing suspension, according a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education. Still, the case of the doodling preteen is raising concerns about the use of zero tolerance policies in schools.
It gets much worse:
Alexa’s case isn’t the first in the New York area. One of the first cases to gain national notoriety was that of Chelsea Fraser. In 2007, the 13-year-old wrote “Okay” on her desk, and police handcuffed and arrested her. She was one of several students arrested in the class that day; the others were accused of plastering the walls with stickers.
At schools across the country, police are being asked to step in. In November, a food fight at a middle school in Chicago, Illinois, resulted in the arrests of 25 children, some as young as 11, according to the Chicago Police Department.
The Strategy Center, a California-based civil rights group that tracks zero tolerance policies, found that at least 12,000 tickets were issued to tardy or truant students by Los Angeles Police Department and school security officers in 2008. The tickets tarnished students’ records and brought them into the juvenile court system, with fines of up to $250 for repeat offenders.
The Strategy Center opposes the system. “The theory is that if we fine them, then they won’t be late again,” said Manuel Criollo, lead organizer of the “No to Pre-Prison” campaign at The Strategy Center. “But they just end up not going to school at all.”
Here’s the progression as I see it.
First, parents start expecting schools to do the parenting for them. They expect schools to teach kids about sex, to inform them about the dangers of drug abuse, and to basically do all the birds, bees, and booze talk for them. Schools are lousy proxies for parenting, so they start to turn to “zero tolerance policies” and that leads to police involvement. Suddenly you have kids in handcuffs for putting stickers on walls or doodling on desks. You have police and school administrators performing illegal strip searches on 13-year-olds because they’re suspected of hiding ibuprofen in their underwear.
You also get a law enforcement bureaucracy fining students for being late – which begins the rather insidious process of financially wedding our education and justice systems in pretty unsavory ways.
It’s bad news, and it’s a pretty strong argument for school choice. If this is the direction our schools are headed, maybe it’s time to not only break Washington’s increasing hold over our education system, but break the public education monopoly up entirely. I support public schools and always have, but it is becoming increasingly (and painfully) obvious that more competition is needed to keep them honest. The harder task, of course, will be getting parents more involved in their kids educations again. Schools are no substitute for learning about life’s more awkward questions, and parents need to step up to the plate. Of course, nobody can legislate good parenting.
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Of course, nobody can legislate good parenting.
Not with *THAT* attitude!
What we need is a parenting union.
And better parenting regulators, too! Or maybe some in-home surveillance systems (something I’m posting about soon!)
In response to another comment. See in context »You’re missing one step in the chain, I think: Fear on behalf of the schools that they’ll be sued for treating various students differently. If you have a no-tolerance policy you can just point to that and say “Look, we dole out the same punishment to everyone regardless of color or creed. Can’t sue us for discrimination now, can you?”
I would sue the hell out of any school that had my daughter arrested for doodling. If I were the litigious type.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] And I talk about school-choice by high-lighting this case of a 12-year old girl arrested for doodling in class. [...]
[...] Winds of Education Erik points to the arrest of a 12 year old for doodling along with some other bizarrely forceful happenings in public [...]
Many children with ADHD doodle because it keeps them focused … so doodling and paying attention aren’t mutually exclusive… even if it’s on a desk. And gee, whatever happened to giving a kid some soap, water and a sponge?
[...] (especially anti-voucher) position toward one more amenable to school choice. Various horror stories have helped contribute to this drift, and I’m ashamed to say that the alarmism these stories [...]
[...] (especially anti-voucher) position toward one more amenable to school choice. Various horror stories have helped contribute to this drift, and I’m ashamed to say that the alarmism these stories [...]