If Yajira Quezada was my daughter, she would be looking at some very lonely nights ahead, as there would be some serious punishment for mouthing off to her principal the way she did. Then again, if she was my daughter, she would already know better than to do that. Having done so, consequences must follow. Just not these consequences.
From NECN :
Eleven-year-old Yajira Quezada, a sixth-grader at Colorado’s Shaw Heights Middle School, was handcuffed and taken to a holding facility for disobeying the orders of an assistant principal during lunch and being “argumentative and extremely rude”.
An Adams County Sheriff’s Office incident report says the assistant principal found Yajira walking in the hallway during lunch because the girl claimed she was cold and needed to get a sweater from her locker.
The report says the assistant principal was in mid-sentence when Yajira, “turned and walked away saying, ‘I don’t have time for this.'”
It’s hard to imagine an 11-year-old being so contemptuous of authority. Some will applaud her under the twisted reasoning of autonomy and anarchy, but that’s nonsense. Regardless of whether the assistant principal was making too much of things, or failed to show a child the “respect” the child believed her personal choices to be due, no society can function without limits. And when it comes to schools, this is particularly true. There may well be good reason for Yajira to be in the hallway to get a sweater, but there is no good reason for her to think she can dismiss the assistant principal.
The school appears to have made some effort to make this point to Yajira by having her speak with a counselor, though there’s a dearth of information as to what exactly this means. In any event, it didn’t help.
When intervention efforts with a counselor failed, Yajira was handcuffed and put in the school resource officer’s patrol car and taken to a juvenile holding facility called “The Link.”
This is where the story of a student in need of an attitude adjustment heads south. Quickly.
Steve Saunders, director of communications and community relations for Adams County School District 50, says anytime an incident rises to this level, officials take a close look at what happened.
“You hate to see something escalate to where it becomes a police matter. Once they step in and take over a case, it is really in their hands. The conclusion was, as far as the district was concerned, everything was handled appropriately,” Saunders said.
Did something else happen that isn’t revealed in the story? Did Yajira pull out a gun, perhaps? What did she do to “escalate” anything beyond being rude to the assistant principal in the first place? There is nothing to suggest that anything else happened. Yet Saunders’ spin suggests that the school administration had nothing to do with this 11-year-old being cuffed and taken away. “Once [the police] step in…it is really in their hands.” And how exactly did the police come to “step in?” Benign rhetoric doesn’t conceal that the police “stepped in” at the school’s insistence. Sorry, Saunders, but you can’t avoid the school’s role here.
The question was never whether this conduct was acceptable or should be tolerated by the school, but what could conceivably compel school administrators to think that an “extreme[ly] rude” student, no matter how rude, required police intervention.
Had Yajira resisted being cuffed, would they have tased her? Maybe beaten her with a baton. And if she fled down the hallway, would the officer have pulled out his weapon and plugged her from behind to stop this fleeing rude student?
Granted, the problem with such arrogance on the part of students, thinking they are entitled to show utter disrespect at will, may be more pervasive than it used to be. Granted, it’s got to be awfully offensive to the assistant principal, whose authority was facially challenged and who needs to seize back control if she’s to do her job. But rudeness is not a crime. Rudeness is not a threat to the safety of other students. There was no risk of rude words causing physical harm to another student. There was no justification for calling in the cops.
What this suggests is that the nice folks holding positions of authority at school are incapable of handling their responsibilities. Perhaps they lack the ability to persuade students to show respect. Perhaps they’re just too easily annoyed and intolerant to deal with yet another student with a big mouth. But this is the job they’ve taken and the responsibility they bear. They are entrusted with the lives of young people, including rude young people. They are not allowed to toss them to the cops whenever the job gets a little too hard.
The tales of school administrators with trivial, absurd or inflexible rules dumping otherwise excellent students in the lap of the law because some school policy dictates they must, is bad enough. Here, however, there was no zero tolerance policy, rationalized under the rubric of student safety, that left administrators with at least an arguable excuse.
Yajira was rude. Eleven-year-old students shouldn’t be rude, and the school would be well within their authority to have a stern talk with both Yajira and her parents about consequences if she doesn’t get her attitude straightened out. Not only would such a response not be the subject of scrutiny, but it would likely get applause.
But if schools can’t handle the occasional rude child without throwing her to the police, then they have no business being charged with care of children at all. Thankfully, Yajira wasn’t charged with Rudeness in the Third Degree and subject to a full cavity search. It could have been worse.
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Yeah, I’ll defend the girl for her treatement of the government school lackey. She was treated like an inmate rather than a reasonable person who needed a sweater. Such is life for children in compulsory government schools. The tax-fed administrator is the one in need of an attitude adjustment, too bad the girl’s dad wasn’t there to give it to him.
I hold these people in nothing less than withering contempt. And my mom was a public school teacher.
Nice to have you back SJ. You’ve been missed.
I’m going to assume, for the sake of argument, that it wasn’t her being in the hallway to get a sweater that gave rise to the problem, but her manner of dealing with the assistant principal. While it’s certainly not an unreasonable thing for a child to do, it’s also not unreasonable to be questioned by the assistant principal if she wasn’t supposed to be there. Of course, I’m not sure how much that changes the equation.
I was on a committee with police officers who were called to the schools to deal with similar trivial cases. There were fed up with the school principals but they felt they had to keep their mouths shut.
I asked them if that had cause to charge the principal with making a false report. They said they did but it would not have been a good idea to do so.
The parents on the committee were not so constrained and they were able to make a big enough stench so there was a temporary improvement. The next fall they had to go though the same BS again.
If the above case was accurately described, getting the police involved seems strange on the surface. But, there may be more going on here. Incidences of rudeness among US students seem to be increasing, and this puts schools in an awkward position considering the scrutiny that teachers and principals are under these days. Parents, who often only parent on the weekends, have come to unreasonably expect schools to raise their children. At the same time, teachers no longer have real authority in their classrooms–a fact that has emboldened many students to act with impunity. On top of this, schools have become festivals of narcissism, where disingenuous praise is constantly showered on students, and feelings are considered more important than facts, and critical thinking or problem solving skills. That too many students now see society as their hand maiden, therefore, is no surprise. Discipline disappeared from schools in the 80s and was replaced by the behaviorism that we see today. This is essentially the practice of bribing students with: a) sugary, salty, fatty foods for lunch; b) no PE required to avoid embarrassment in the showers or bullying on playground/gym; c) easy A’s; d) math, science, English, etc. courses gutted of their rigor; e) endlessly writing about feelings; f) school days filled with ‘feel good’ seminars and workshops on bullying and ‘personhood’; g) no winners or losers in sports, or academically; and h) a ridiculous philosophy that the world ‘owes’ them whatever students want just because they are ‘special’. Is it any surprise that all this psychobabble has not worked? But, what are principals to do? On the one hand, they cannot punish students anymore, and on the other behaviorism is not working, and students are out of control. I can imagine what frustration school administrators feel–no matter what they do, they’re wrong. Handing things over to the police actually makes sense in this situation given that the school is no longer in the hot seat. That’s why schools have adopted zero tolerance policies–they have no choice because any internal reaction they have toward student misbehavior is harshly criticized and they can be sued if anything goes wrong. Bringing in the police relieves schools such litigation, which is a major driver behind school board policies these days–and I don’t blame them. Some might argue that we teach our students every day to ‘be nice’ and ‘share’, etc., but I think students see right through these fake platitudes and furthermore wonder why they never have to face anything challenging or scary. Essentially, real life with real punishment and reward is being kept away from them, and they are angry about it. Universities / professional schools, and businesses have been reporting for years that newly admitted students or new hires are significantly lacking in several major areas: work ethic, computation, problem solving, reading, writing, and social skills. I’d be angry too.