Go to the link and watch the video news report, which includes student video of the violence in school. There's an interview with Tim LeMonds, MMSD Director of Communications. If I understand him correctly — and he's not a particularly good communicator — the school's policy is not to call the police unless a weapon is involved or police are needed to stop the fight. The message I hear is that there's a plan never to call the police if attacks are quick and done with bare hands. The video shows a defenseless child getting pummeled as his desk.
As LeMonds put it, “When the attack took place, the teacher reached out for assistance and by the time staff were able to respond the incident was over.” How is that a reason not to call the police?!
There used to be a police officer — a "student resource officer" — stationed in the school, but last summer, the school board voted to end the program — after it was characterized as a racial problem. An argument was made at the time that the lack of a resource officer in the school would increase the likelihood that police would need to be called in from the outside. Now, we're seeing how the school operates, resisting calling the police when there is obvious violent crime in the classroom. This is an untenable solution, victimizing peaceful students.
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can't parents sue the [un]resourceful director/officer?
Really? I distinctly remember an unfortunate 11-year-old boy (happened to be AA) who had cops show up at his house after his teacher spotted a TOY GUN during a zoom call. So perhaps their selectivity in engaging law enforcement has something to do with the Obama era policy discouraging creation of a paper perp trail. You may recall that policy being at the center of the clusterfuck in Florida where everyone other than parents knew about the dangerous kid on campus but indulging Obama’s wish to ignore some children the FBI and local cops did nothing. Then the sheriff showed his cowardice to the whole nation. Madison seems like the kind of district that would keep following bad policy like Obama’s education guidance. They also have minders in every law enforcement agency in the country now. The rot is perhaps too deep now to reverse. Like the FBI.
You will recall that after the Parkland school shooting when the lefties and our LLR's were busy lauding and endlessly praising the "courage" of the officer later found to be a big yellow coward (one particular LLR at Althouse was chock full of praise for this cowardly officer and his democratical Sheriff boss) that the police had actually been called many times over years in regards to the student that would later commit the mass murder.
So, simply getting the police into the building is only the first step and is not enough unless serious action is taken for serious infractions/crimes.
We need to also recall that during the BLM riots in 2020 (yes Howard, there were riots during 2020), the left and LLR-left decided that even pulling a knife and shanking someone was just playful youthful shenanigans. Remember that?
The public education monopoly is systemic racism and child abuse in full bloom. Any parent who allows the state to do this to their children will be sorry.
You see, if you call the police, that's the "school to prison pipeline". And that's why there are proportionally so many more blacks in prisons than whites, which is proof of how racist America is.
"This is an untenable solution, victimizing peaceful students. "
In what way? You just call the parents racist for wanting their children protected and Bob's your uncle. Parents won't like their children being punching bags, but they'll like losing their jobs, bank accounts and homes a lot less. Most will get their kids out of public school and pay out of pocket to send them somewhere just as bad in the deluded hope that the entire system isn't rigged against them. Some few will learn, and teach their children to be a harder target. The children themselves may learn, and arm themselves against such assaults. Which will, of course, elicit a police response immediately. Self defense, unlike assault, will not be tolerated.
If Blacks are disciplined disproportionately, then that is proof that the school is racist.
Therefore, the school better cover up its actual discipline situation.
Too bad for the children who get beat up.
When I went to my 45th public high school reunion a few years back, a group of us alumni were given a tour of the school building, so we could see what was different and what was the same. Most interesting and entertaining.
But before the tour began, one of the guidance counselors gave a short talk and answered questions. We learned that a police officer is now stationed daily in the school (preposterous when I was a student). The reason for the police officer is that "crimes are committed here almost every day." Not many violent crimes, thankfully, but serious enough thefts and assaults that having someone in authority immediately available is a blessing to the teachers and the students who want to learn.
Times have changed.
Same way some adults were acting in Madison burning down the city last summer. The police stood down because of orders from the Mayors. You wonder WHY crimes are way up?? We are living in a lawless time where truth tellers are jailed, and the corrupt can do whatever they want.
As a retired former inner city social studies teacher I'm here to tell you that serious crimes were committed most days I taught. From simple battery to aggravated battery, petit theft to grand theft. Automobile theft of a teacher's car. Illegal drug sales were a daily thing. I could go on for hours. If I saw trouble or even smelled trouble I hauled ass in the opposite direction as I did my best Sgt Schultz impression - "I see nothing!"
There was zero profit in turning children in for violating the law. All to often the children would lie about the teacher with accompanying convenient "witnesses" and quicker than a hummingbird could dart the teacher would be accused for some imaginary crime like "choking" a student in pulling them off another student they were assaulting. As a Union Building Rep I watched teacher after teacher after teacher have horrendous legal bills defending themselves. Many quit. More than a few fired. If the seniors were selling freshman into bondage or running the bathroom drug mall well more power to them. I'm not walking into that bathroom where the first thing the drug syndicate members say is that Mr. Heartless pulled out his dick and asked for it to be sucked. The tv news station love, Love, LOVE that kind of story. And nobody, I repeat nobody, is going to believe an elderly teacher trying to do the right thing. Those days are over. I'll stop here. You get the idea ... I truly can't believe they can find anybody to take those jobs..
Yeah that school-to-prison pipeline is awfully leaky seeing as how so few white or Asian students pop out the end in lock-up. Maybe it’s more like a filter than a tube. And the highly racist teachers union is obviously to blame.
I fear reason the school district routes all student assault cases through one of their own employees before going to the police is that the bureaucrats who run the district consider the purpose of the school district to be the maximizing of their own jobs and influence, not the welfare of their students. I also fear this is a very tenable situation, indeed almost indestructible.
I was attacked a dozen or so times between middle and high school. Most of my attackers were fire-breathing assholes, but I would not go back in time and have them arrested. And I would not have cooperated with any police at the time.
Women, especially, will have a hard time swallowing this, but kids need some room to be kids--even to be bad kids, without accumulating permanent records. Almost every adult male I know in my age group has punched another male in the face during his life.
You've got to draw the line somewhere. But a fight, or even an attack, that ends without significant injury, is well within a school's discipline system's competence.
Trying to explain the official indifference and lack of support that I experienced when I would get beat down at suburban Chicago public schools in the 1960s, the only thing I could think of was that the teachers and administrators were convinced that they needed a certain level of chaos and (ideally non-lethal)violence on the premises for the place to run properly. Now that I'm 50 years older and retired from the bar,I see it as more of a ploy for more funding.
"This is an untenable solution, victimizing peaceful students."
It is enough to make you cynical, isn't it? It is as though they don't want to acknowledge that there is a problem, let alone a solution. Just wait until some child gets badly hurt--either because the peaceful students continue to be victimized or because the peaceful students suddenly stop being peaceful--these jamokes will keep doing the same thing, namely, refusing to acknowledge either the problem or an obvious solution.
I assume the perpetrators weren't white as that would have been spelled out in the story. And the police would have been called straightaway.
If the victim had been knifed quickly would the incident have been treated as closed because it was over so quickly?
"Untenable - Not capable of being maintained or defended. Not capable of being occupied or lived in. Insupportable; intolerable."
Permanent low-level peer-to-peer violence. Perfectly maintainable, defendable if one accepts the priors of the MMSD leadership. This is exactly what the school board and teachers union in Madison have asked for. They'll make it work, 'equity' demands it. Perfectly tolerable. Unless you're a victim. Then you're on your own. Especially if you are White.
Ain't liberalism great!
Per r/Teachers violence and craziness generally is up this year in all grades, even kindergartners trying to beat the shit out of each other.
And admin always wants it hushed up.
The resource officer in the school was seen as having a disproportionate burdensome effect on the mind of black students. In this case, you have an actual physical assault, and I have no idea what the race the different kids were. I see the mother in the video and have no opinion about her race.
Anyway, you can't allow a school to descend into violence and fear. This one mother has taken her child out of the school. That's what will happen. People will withdraw from the schools if the schools are not safe.
"Anyway, you can't allow a school to descend into violence and fear. "
Sure you can. It's being done all over the place. It's the new normal, get used to it. Maybe a teacher could be the faculty sponsor for the Fight Club.
Ann Althouse said...
The resource officer in the school was seen as having a disproportionate burdensome effect on the mind of black students. In this case, you have an actual physical assault, and I have no idea what the race the different kids were. I see the mother in the video and have no opinion about her race.
IMHO, the attacker (is black) hitting the kid sitting. The mom, white. YMMV
Some students felt "uncomfortable" having a police officer in school, much like a bank robber would feel uncomfortable having a police officer at the bank.
Ann Althouse wrote, "This one mother has taken her child out of the school. That's what will happen. People will withdraw from the schools if the schools are not safe."
And it will continue as long as the funding dollars aren't withdrawn with the child.
Let the Dollars Follow the Children
In our proposal, funding must follow students and be weighted to compensate for the extra costs associated with high-need students if schools are to compete for students and if parents are to have real choice. Parents must have the widest possible choice of schools for their children and be armed with good information on the performance of schools. Informed choice that is accompanied by financial consequences for schools will create a marketplace for schooling that will evolve toward greater responsiveness to what parents want, will be more innovative, and will become more productive.
Let the Dollars Follow the Child
As with police and border patrol so with school discipline. Blue Zone Democrats and BLM/Antifa are starting to realize that you don't even have to literally defund the police or abolish INS. All it takes is to make the jobs of actually enforcing law and order (or borders) impossibly risky for individual officers or teachers. They'll adapt by retreating, and redefine their jobs to calling ambulances, taking witness statements, crime scene photos, filing incident reports until pensions are fully vested.
Parents and residents of Blue Zone cities who don't want to live through the predictable explosion of violence and lawlessness have no choice but to get out.
The case for a school resource officer was made on March 20, 2018, at Great Mills High School in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. A 17 year old male student smuggled a Glock into the school, and used it to shoot two students (one eventually died of her wounds). Before he could shoot any more students the school resource officer ran up to the scene. The officer fired one round, not-fatally wounding the student shooter in the hand, whereupon the shooter killed himself with his own gun.
Has the incident happened in Madison, the death toll would have been … much higher.
The answer to the questions you pose, Ann, is racism.
The answer is racism, no matter the question.
We had fights in school all the time back in the 1970's. There is no need for criminalization of normal male adolescent behavior.
This is an untenable solution, victimizing peaceful students.
Anyway, you can't allow a school to descend into violence and fear.
@Althouse, the Madison school board begs to differ with both your statements. Except that isn’t quite right, is it? The Madison school board contemptuously dismisses both your statements. That’s a good ways closer to the mark,isn’t it?
Really, Madam, when are the sane liberals like yourself going to set straight the members of the crazy wing of liberalism? It’s not going to fix itself, and conservatives like Blaska are just one small voice. You can throw up your hands and do nothing except bitch and whine about the situation, but bitching and whining to your readership isn’t going to accomplish a damned thing, and you surely know that already. Or you can identify and make common cause with people trying to change the system. It’s a bit much like work, I know, but nothing less will fix anything.
It is one of the delicious ironies of the past year that those who have sought attention the most avidly are bearing the brunt of getting what they are demanding. Don't want the cops in school? OK. You are going to get what you asked for, and the peaceful students will leave. When your vicious, and indeed feral, children rule the hallways and playgrounds, Elmer Fudd-like characters such as this Tim LeMonds (MMSD Director of Communications) will carefully explain the school's process for handling violent incidents via after-action reports and, I suppose, grief counselling. When your most effective action appears to be "They went that-a-way" (points in wrong direction), there is more trouble coming.
This is all in "Atlas Shrugged", more or less. For those who haven't read it, the dystopian tale hangs on the idea that the has been an unspecified "emergency" that has led America to be governed by a small clique of small men, cheered on by many corporate CEOs who see a chance for major-league level rent-seeking, avidly issuing emergency executive orders with the amplitude and fluency of Illinois's own Gov. J. B. "Fatso" Pritzker. I have to say that the current crop of non-achievers has gotten to the public schools even more quickly and thoroughly than Ayn Rand imagined, although I don't think she would be surprised. The NYC public schools are adopting their own version of the "Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Rule" (No railroad may go faster than the slowest railroad in the country. It wouldn't be fair).
So Madison will go down a well-trodden path that leads directly over the precipice because no one wanted to yell "Look out!" Kudos to the mom who is jumping out of line.
"We had fights in school all the time back in the 1970's."
Howard, sometimes you really do outdo yourself. Let's see how many things we can think of that are different now than they were in the 1970s, particularly in terms of parental authority and guidance, civic and communitarian activities, and career opportunities for the uneducated.
"Internal colonization theory":
"Most pragmatic responses to school violence seek to assign individual blame and to instill individual responsibility in students. The authors of this article argue that school violence is the result of the structural violence of oppressive social conditions that force[!] students (especially low-income, male African American and Latino students**) to feel vulnerable, angry, and resistant to the normative expectations of prison-like school environments."
** Why them and not others?
Wendy 3:16 - Testify.
It's all fun and games until a kid goes over the edge, brings a gun to school and shoots his/her tormentors. Turn that "mistake" into a learning experience, MMSD.
"We had fights in school all the time back in the 1970's. There is no need for criminalization of normal male adolescent behavior."
There is need for punishment when it happens - so that the feral nature is trained out. 'Normal male adolescent behavior' HAS to be tempered so they can become functional adults.
When you take away responsibility for their actions, when you deny them agency, when you make excuse after excuse after excuse for their bad behavior - you're doing them no favors at all. You may think they're the victims of 'the man' - poor little unfortunate souls who must be protected from having any sort of restrictions on their psyches...
And hey, their victims? They don't count. At all.
I remember when "SRO" was "standing room only." Then it was "single room occupancy." Now it's "school resource officer." I believe that all three are slated to be removed.
One thing that is new and different about school fights is that they're being recorded and replayed. It's one thing to take a pummeling. It's another to have it played and re-played by your classmates all year long. The worst day of that kid's life has been captured for posterity.....The kid doing the beating will probably come to a worse end than the other kid, but who wants to wait that long.
You want the dollars to follow the child? Make 'em join the teachers union.
So the simple solution is, teach your kid Bar Fight 101. Don’t waste time with fisticuffs and Kung fu! Gouge, bite, kick goolies, twist and break thumbs, use pencils to blind or punch holes in vital vessels!
Ask for a copy of the school’s Protocol of Liability Avoidance & Educationally Approved Process — and use it as a guide of what NOT to do. What you want is, not to be compliant but to be feared.
I read the excerpt. Did not read the article/link. Read Althouse comment - the only part mentioning race. Read the comments, mostly regarding on race and crime (sadly, being correct). Went to the link. Things as expected, supporting the comments.
It is interesting that the excerpt mentions nothing about race. The violence, clearly requires some serious intervention. The biggest concern for teachers should be to determine at what point an inevitable conflict between students constitutes a ‘kids growing and finding what behavior is inappropriate’, and a crime requiring police intervention.
How does violent behavior response depend on race? Oh, how we have devolved as a society.
Why don’t universities call the police when sexual assaults are alleged on campus?
Why don't schools call the police when crimes are committed in schools?
Two reasons come to mind:
..Schools are very closed systems; think bureaucratic, nepotistic, incestuous, self-isolating. Knowledge of any problems is very closely held.
..Money (in Texas) comes to school districts largely from outside the district, from the State, and is based on attendance. To preserve funding truants must be found and, by force of law, returned to the kraal. City and County cops are unlikely to expend much effort on truancy.
A better question is: Why are schools so closed, bureaucratic, nepotistic, incestuous, and self-isolating? The short answer is: the voters (a distinct cohort from tax payers or registered voters) allow it.
There is MUCH money in play here. School District local ad-valorem tax (in Texas) is significantly larger than for either City or County. With major funding added from State and Federal sources, the amount of funding is HUGE. So therefore is the power of the Board over locally available jobs.
Schools are often the largest employer in an area (followed by County, City, hospital, and other publicly funded bodies). There is no salary attached to the job, although the time commitment is large. School Board candidates are usually close relatives of school employees in the District, former employees of the District, or employees of a neighbor District who reside in the voting District. They represent neither "the children" nor the tax payers, but rather the employees of the District.
The second linked video shows the mom stating that her son was threatened the day before the assault.
The threat was reported that same day to school authorities. The authorities assured her that they’d had a “stern discussion” with the person(s) issuing the threat and as a result her son would be safe in school.
The very next day he was jumped from behind and assaulted as he sat at his desk in his classroom.
Perhaps those AARs of which administrator LeMonds is so proud of ought to be FOIAed.
I went to Newton South High School in Massachusetts in the late 1960s. It was 70% Jewish, 99% white. (Today there are a lot of Asian Americans.) I never saw a fight, although I heard occasional rumors of after-school fights. It’s now extremely woke, as is the whole Newton school system, although I’d wager there still aren’t any fights there.
At the all-boys HS I attended, if a scuffle broke out, the priests would stop it, then announce the two combatants would fight on the football field after school and that all students were required to attend. That curtailed a lot of nonsense.
"People will withdraw from the schools if the schools are not safe."
If your kids aren't criminals, they don't belong in prisons.
Typical dumbass teachers and principals.
The parents should call the police themselves and press charges.
You know, last year this would have been an extremely effective policy in preventing all that looting and arson when those "mostly peaceful" protest happened in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities.
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