How many of us would give a moments consideration to leaving the keys to our home with a complete stranger, freely giving them and empowering them with access to our personal lives and our most valuable possessions without question or accountability and with an immunity to the law?
Not anyone that I know and I am sure few if any of you know a single person that would act with such irresponsibility and yet, as parents this is exactly what we do with our children each school day! And our children are worth so much more than our most valuable possessions!
As responsible adults we should be ashamed of ourselves at the amount of authority and empowerment we have given to our schools! And do not think for a single moment that we have not handed them a tremendous amount of authority without accountability and with a tremendous degree of immunity to the law that any other individual would be held to!
One example of such extreme authority:
It is absolutely legal for any teacher, counselor, assistant principal, principal or any other appointed faculty member to sentence any student to any length of time in an Alternative Education Center without any legal process and no form of appeal. Doesn't this seem to be at odds with basic rights granted under both state and federal law? Such actions of punishment are often used in a capricious manner and seem to violate many basic civil rights!
Our children are often sentenced to school detention centers for minor infractions, where they must surrender themselves each day and be imprisoned there with those who have been accused of everything from using inappropriate language at school to dealing drugs, all of the way up to multiple murders. And as parents, I fail to see how we continue to allow such drastic and Draconian punishments be handed to any child without any form of legal counsel or legal appeal and I certainly cannot and do not understand how we allow these things without holding any kind of accountability to those sentencing our children in this manner!
In our zest to improve the future and the immediate lives of our children, I'm sure we have lost sight that children are exactly that - children and mistakes will often be made by childish choices. As parents we would never consider imprisoning our children for being a child with a childish mentality and yet, we send them to school where school officials all too frequently sentence them to prison (Alternative Education Centers) for being just that - children!
As shameful as it is, the fact of the matter is many of these same school officials have been voted into their position of authority by none other than, us - the parent -the voter! Adding to the shame is the fact that these same school officials will be voted back in to these same positions time and again by us - the parent - the voter! And most shameful of all is the fact that few parents will become involved and insist changes be made and our children be allowed to become children again until such a time that one of their own children have been sentenced to imprisonment by a school official!
Shame on me!
Shame on you!
Shame on us!
==================================
12 Year Old Student Forced To Watch Execution
http://katyzerotolerance.homestead.co...
Conroe ISD
INCIDENT:
My son, age 12, realized in his third period class that he had left his Boy Scout camping knife in the interior pocket of his jacket. He never displayed the knife or remotely threatened anyone. My son knew he could not tell a school official because he knew he would be in the same amount of trouble anyway so he told a supposed friend about the knife at lunch in hopes the friend would have some idea as what he should do about the situation. After lunch my son put the knife in his backpack in his locker to get it off of his person. The supposed friend turned my son in.
CISD RESPONSE:
CISD police upon discovering the knife arrested my son because the type of pocketknife my son had inadvertently brought to school was listed as a prohibited weapon in the penal code (My son had legally purchased this knife at a gun & knife show in Houston). My son requested to call his parents but was not allowed to. My son was taken to the Montgomery County Juvenile Detention Center. We were never contacted during this entire process. My wife was finally contacted ½ hour after my son's school bus had run by our home while she was on her way to the school to try to locate our son. My wife was panic stricken trying to locate our son during this time. My son was expelled from school for 45 calendar days and required to attend the Montgomery County JJAEP Boot Camp where he was physically and psychologically abused.
COURT:
No charges were ever filed. A Montgomery County juvenile probation officer gave my son a supervisory caution. He was required to go visit a murderer and was required to watch a film showing convicted murderers being electrocuted as a condition of the supervisory caution. This is just what every parent wants his or her 12-year-old child exposed to.
I have contacted the following Texas state officials about all of these issues:
Governor Rick Perry
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst
Senator Tommy Williams
Senator Jon Lindsay
Senator Florence Shapiro – Head of the Senate Education Committee
Representative Rob Eissler
Representative Kent Grusendorf – Head of the House of Representatives Education Committee
==================================
Student Rights? ... What Rights?
http://katyzerotolerance.homestead.co...
By: M.Q.
The United States Constitution guarantees all citizens of the United States all of the rights in the Bill of Rights ... right? Well, it is not that simple. Does a parent have the right to search his/her child's room? Does a small child have a right to choose his/her own religion? Does a child caught with his/her hand in the cookie jar and a mouth full of cookie crumbs have a right to due process? My point is that children do not have the same rights as adults. They are subject to the authority of their parents.
What about at public elementary and secondary schools? The parents are not around. Parents extend some of this parental authority to schools by proxy. It is parental authority by proxy. It is not school authority alone. Do students have legal rights at school? The short answer is: Not many. At school, children are subject to the authority of teachers and school administration, in place of parents. Schools are not democracies any more than the homes of the students. Adults rule the schools.
Student Rights and Responsibilities
The term " Student Rights and Responsibilities" seems to come from the heading in the Katy ISD school board policy manual, and it in turn is derived from Texas Statutes. It seems to be deceitfully designed to make one believe that the school district considers student rights in the way that the administration treats the students.. Neither of these documents list any specific student rights under this heading. There is plenty there on student responsibilities, though. Whenever I do an Internet search on "student rights" I get opinions of common people and journalists. None of these opinions hold any weight. Any of the " hits" from this search that come from schools, lawyers, state statutes, or court cases fall under "Student Rights and Responsibilities" . Every such article that I've found contains ONLY RESPONSIBILITES and NO rights at all. There doesn't seem to be anything out there on " Student Rights" alone except academic opinions.
Morals or Ethics
Right and wrong are moral terms. The term "rights" is derived from this moral meaning of the word right, but laws don't deal with morals or with right vs wrong, only legal vs illegal. Morals, including right and wrong are considered religious concepts. As close to morals as laws dare to come is with what we call ethics. It is sort of a nonreligious substitution for morals. The word "ethics" does not appear at all in Texas Penal or Family codes. It appears in the Education Code while talking about safeguards against financial corruption. Most of Katy ISD's policy for student conduct comes from these statutes. Since laws skirt morals almost completely, Katy ISD doesn't consider the issue of right vs wrong when it is time to deal with your children. Katy ISD does whatever is legal in order to control your children. Conscience must be another religious term, foreign to Katy ISD.
There is a section in the Katy ISD Board Policy online in regards to educators' conduct towards students. It is found in DH (Exhibit), standards 3.1 through 3.7. Standard 3.2 says:
Standard 3.2. The educator shall not knowingly treat a student in a manner that adversely affects the student's learning, physical health, mental health, or safety.
This looks good in writing, but is undermined by the negative impact of applying harsh punishments for minor infractions. Sending a student to DAEP where students are routinely treated like inmates in a penitentiary has a very adverse effect on almost every aspect of a child's life, including his/her education. This adverse effect often lingers for years after graduation from high school.
Parents, pay attention to what is going on at school! Katy ISD is unteaching the values of right and wrong that you have taught your children.
Opinions coming from various courts are slanted against students even when the laws they cite are in favor of citizens. Students are not considered citizens, but subjects, of schools. Schools are not democracies. So they are exempt from applying democratic principles. Public schools bestow no rights to children unless forced to do so by law. Student rights diminish the administration's power to maintain control. The courts seem to allow schools to do whatever they want to their subjects short of physical harm, so long as they provide an education, even if it means DAEP (Discipline Alternative Education Program).
DAEP was started because if Katy ISD expels your child, that would be tantamount to denying him/her his constitutional right to a free public education. Presumably your child is still getting a free public education in DAEP. If they expel they do not receive the money from the State, whereas AEP or DAEP students are still in the count for money. It is viewed by courts and schools as a school or education program. Parents and students view it as the ultimate punishment that a school can dish out. The education that your child will get at DAEP is vastly inferior to what (s)he gets at his/her home school. The primary mission of DAEP is to modify the behavior of your child. The education at DAEP is only very basic, not challenging. Face it, DAEP is a school prison, not an educational setting.
Why Do We Need School Police?
When courts punish people, they can execute them, imprison them, or fine them. Schools are not allowed to do those things. They are only supposed to teach. So if they want to imprison or fine a student they have their own police department to do it for them, as if the police were not an integral part of the school district. The disciplinary actions allowed by schools are not viewed as punishments by courts.
For instance, consider Miranda Rights. All citizens have a right against self incrimination. Your school district has found a legal loophole that allows it to deny your child his/her constitutional right against self incrimination. Since students are subjects of the school system, rather than citizens, Katy ISD has issued this policy "State law that applies to law enforcement officers in interrogating juveniles does not apply to public school administrators in their enforcement of discipline. Miranda warnings do not apply to school disciplinary proceedings." This is a convenient way for Katy ISD to control your child and absolve itself of the responsibility of providing a Miranda warning. You see, Miranda warnings are only required by law when police make an arrest.
Here is what will happen to 20% of the students in a typical Katy ISD junior high or high school: The principal will interrogated your child. (S)he will be coerced into incriminating him/herself without being allowed the right against self incrimination. Your child will be disciplined (read punished) for "hindering an investigation" if (s)he tries to assert his/her rights. Then after tricking your child into saying something incriminating they will call in their very own police to write your child a ticket or arrest him/her. The police would have been required to advise your child of his/her rights before asking the very same questions, or any court would reject prosecution. (This is another loophole. The police only have to have to issue a Miranda warning as required by law, while making an arrest, but even without the Miranda warning your child still has the right not to say anything to the police that may incriminate him/herself. A point not mentioned in the court opinions that I have read is that even if a child, being under age, is read his Miranda rights, it would not be fair to expect him/her to understand the consequences of a few seeming harmless words.
Parents should be present before any interrogations in order to protect his/her child, in spite of the Katy ISD policy that reads: "Principal ordinarily shall make reasonable efforts notify parents. If the interviewer raises what the principal considers to be a valid objection to the notification, parents will not be notified.". And then after all of this is done and punishments have been decided, the school will contact you and inform you that your son or daughter is in trouble with the law. There is a high probability that your child will be sent to DAEP.
You will have to deal with the law in a criminal court in order to be afforded due process. Meanwhile, the school will go ahead and punish your child immediately regardless of the outcome of your court case. All accused students will be disciplined no matter what. The school knows that due process in a court of law will almost always take so long that even if the court decided completely in your favor, it would be too late. It really doesn't matter what the outcome of court proceeding is due to a ticket, even if the ticket was the cause of the punishment in the first place. That is completely separate from school discipline. Due process is self-extinguishing when the punishment is allowed to follow immediately after accusation.
OK, They Have Turned your Child In To the Police. Isn't that enough already?
If that is not enough, if your child is a member of a student organization, the school will require this (supposed student run) organization to impose it's own sanctions against your child. The fact is, the school does not have a right to do this because they didn't bestow these privileges in the first place. It would be up to the Student Council, National Honor Society, or Cheer Leaders, for example, to take away any of it's members privileges. They can only acted independently on their own by laws if they are privy to all the facts of the disciplinary case and are allowed their own due process free from interference by the principal. Is it legal for the school to interfere? It doesn't matter. It is wrong! Katy ISD has no conscience. Our School Board does not require a conscience for the position of principal.
No matter how I analyze it, I still conclude that KISD has abused its authority, power and our children. Katy ISD has abused it's authority that we parents have extended to them in proxy, over our children. They have lawyers to make sure that what they do is legal. Guess who pays their lawyers? You do. If you have to go to court to defend your child, you will be paying for all of the lawyers. The school district will happily spend all of your money on appeal after appeal. KISD does not have a conscience, and apparently neither do many of the people in power at KISD. We need school policies that enforce what is right, in spite of the lack of consciences, not just what is legal. We need policies to legalize what is right and forbid what is wrong.
We must not allow our schools to use the district's police as their very own personal strong arms that allows them to trample on our children's constitutional rights and our rights to raise our children.
© KatyZeroTolerance.com 2004
8 Comments
#1 DM
on August 1, 2007 at 8:43 a.m.(Odessa, TX | Unverified Name)
How many of us would give a moments consideration to leaving the keys to our home with a complete stranger, freely giving them and empowering them with access to our personal lives and our most valuable possessions without question or accountability and with an immunity to the law?
Not anyone that I know and I am sure few if any of you know a single person that would act with such irresponsibility and yet, as parents this is exactly what we do with our children each school day! And our children are worth so much more than our most valuable possessions!
As responsible adults we should be ashamed of ourselves at the amount of authority and empowerment we have given to our schools! And do not think for a single moment that we have not handed them a tremendous amount of authority without accountability and with a tremendous degree of immunity to the law that any other individual would be held to!
One example of such extreme authority:
It is absolutely legal for any teacher, counselor, assistant principal, principal or any other appointed faculty member to sentence any student to any length of time in an Alternative Education Center without any legal process and no form of appeal. Doesn't this seem to be at odds with basic rights granted under both state and federal law? Such actions of punishment are often used in a capricious manner and seem to violate many basic civil rights!
Our children are often sentenced to school detention centers for minor infractions, where they must surrender themselves each day and be imprisoned there with those who have been accused of everything from using inappropriate language at school to dealing drugs, all of the way up to multiple murders. And as parents, I fail to see how we continue to allow such drastic and Draconian punishments be handed to any child without any form of legal counsel or legal appeal and I certainly cannot and do not understand how we allow these things without holding any kind of accountability to those sentencing our children in this manner!
In our zest to improve the future and the immediate lives of our children, I'm sure we have lost sight that children are exactly that - children and mistakes will often be made by childish choices. As parents we would never consider imprisoning our children for being a child with a childish mentality and yet, we send them to school where school officials all too frequently sentence them to prison (Alternative Education Centers) for being just that - children!
As shameful as it is, the fact of the matter is many of these same school officials have been voted into their position of authority by none other than, us - the parent -the voter! Adding to the shame is the fact that these same school officials will be voted back in to these same positions time and again by us - the parent - the voter! And most shameful of all is the fact that few parents will become involved and insist changes be made and our children be allowed to become children again until such a time that one of their own children have been sentenced to imprisonment by a school official!
Shame on me!
Shame on you!
Shame on us!
==================================
12 Year Old Student Forced To Watch Execution
http://katyzerotolerance.homestead.co...
Conroe ISD
INCIDENT:
My son, age 12, realized in his third period class that he had left his Boy Scout camping knife in the interior pocket of his jacket. He never displayed the knife or remotely threatened anyone. My son knew he could not tell a school official because he knew he would be in the same amount of trouble anyway so he told a supposed friend about the knife at lunch in hopes the friend would have some idea as what he should do about the situation. After lunch my son put the knife in his backpack in his locker to get it off of his person. The supposed friend turned my son in.
CISD RESPONSE:
CISD police upon discovering the knife arrested my son because the type of pocketknife my son had inadvertently brought to school was listed as a prohibited weapon in the penal code (My son had legally purchased this knife at a gun & knife show in Houston). My son requested to call his parents but was not allowed to. My son was taken to the Montgomery County Juvenile Detention Center. We were never contacted during this entire process. My wife was finally contacted ½ hour after my son's school bus had run by our home while she was on her way to the school to try to locate our son. My wife was panic stricken trying to locate our son during this time. My son was expelled from school for 45 calendar days and required to attend the Montgomery County JJAEP Boot Camp where he was physically and psychologically abused.
COURT:
No charges were ever filed. A Montgomery County juvenile probation officer gave my son a supervisory caution. He was required to go visit a murderer and was required to watch a film showing convicted murderers being electrocuted as a condition of the supervisory caution. This is just what every parent wants his or her 12-year-old child exposed to.
I have contacted the following Texas state officials about all of these issues:
Governor Rick Perry
Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst
Senator Tommy Williams
Senator Jon Lindsay
Senator Florence Shapiro – Head of the Senate Education Committee
Representative Rob Eissler
Representative Kent Grusendorf – Head of the House of Representatives Education Committee
==================================
Student Rights? ... What Rights?
http://katyzerotolerance.homestead.co...
By: M.Q.
The United States Constitution guarantees all citizens of the United States all of the rights in the Bill of Rights ... right? Well, it is not that simple. Does a parent have the right to search his/her child's room? Does a small child have a right to choose his/her own religion? Does a child caught with his/her hand in the cookie jar and a mouth full of cookie crumbs have a right to due process? My point is that children do not have the same rights as adults. They are subject to the authority of their parents.
What about at public elementary and secondary schools? The parents are not around. Parents extend some of this parental authority to schools by proxy. It is parental authority by proxy. It is not school authority alone. Do students have legal rights at school? The short answer is: Not many. At school, children are subject to the authority of teachers and school administration, in place of parents. Schools are not democracies any more than the homes of the students. Adults rule the schools.
Student Rights and Responsibilities
The term " Student Rights and Responsibilities" seems to come from the heading in the Katy ISD school board policy manual, and it in turn is derived from Texas Statutes. It seems to be deceitfully designed to make one believe that the school district considers student rights in the way that the administration treats the students.. Neither of these documents list any specific student rights under this heading. There is plenty there on student responsibilities, though. Whenever I do an Internet search on "student rights" I get opinions of common people and journalists. None of these opinions hold any weight. Any of the " hits" from this search that come from schools, lawyers, state statutes, or court cases fall under "Student Rights and Responsibilities" . Every such article that I've found contains ONLY RESPONSIBILITES and NO rights at all. There doesn't seem to be anything out there on " Student Rights" alone except academic opinions.
Morals or Ethics
Right and wrong are moral terms. The term "rights" is derived from this moral meaning of the word right, but laws don't deal with morals or with right vs wrong, only legal vs illegal. Morals, including right and wrong are considered religious concepts. As close to morals as laws dare to come is with what we call ethics. It is sort of a nonreligious substitution for morals. The word "ethics" does not appear at all in Texas Penal or Family codes. It appears in the Education Code while talking about safeguards against financial corruption. Most of Katy ISD's policy for student conduct comes from these statutes. Since laws skirt morals almost completely, Katy ISD doesn't consider the issue of right vs wrong when it is time to deal with your children. Katy ISD does whatever is legal in order to control your children. Conscience must be another religious term, foreign to Katy ISD.
There is a section in the Katy ISD Board Policy online in regards to educators' conduct towards students. It is found in DH (Exhibit), standards 3.1 through 3.7. Standard 3.2 says:
Standard 3.2. The educator shall not knowingly treat a student in a manner that adversely affects the student's learning, physical health, mental health, or safety.
This looks good in writing, but is undermined by the negative impact of applying harsh punishments for minor infractions. Sending a student to DAEP where students are routinely treated like inmates in a penitentiary has a very adverse effect on almost every aspect of a child's life, including his/her education. This adverse effect often lingers for years after graduation from high school.
Parents, pay attention to what is going on at school! Katy ISD is unteaching the values of right and wrong that you have taught your children.
Opinions coming from various courts are slanted against students even when the laws they cite are in favor of citizens. Students are not considered citizens, but subjects, of schools. Schools are not democracies. So they are exempt from applying democratic principles. Public schools bestow no rights to children unless forced to do so by law. Student rights diminish the administration's power to maintain control. The courts seem to allow schools to do whatever they want to their subjects short of physical harm, so long as they provide an education, even if it means DAEP (Discipline Alternative Education Program).
DAEP was started because if Katy ISD expels your child, that would be tantamount to denying him/her his constitutional right to a free public education. Presumably your child is still getting a free public education in DAEP. If they expel they do not receive the money from the State, whereas AEP or DAEP students are still in the count for money. It is viewed by courts and schools as a school or education program. Parents and students view it as the ultimate punishment that a school can dish out. The education that your child will get at DAEP is vastly inferior to what (s)he gets at his/her home school. The primary mission of DAEP is to modify the behavior of your child. The education at DAEP is only very basic, not challenging. Face it, DAEP is a school prison, not an educational setting.
Why Do We Need School Police?
When courts punish people, they can execute them, imprison them, or fine them. Schools are not allowed to do those things. They are only supposed to teach. So if they want to imprison or fine a student they have their own police department to do it for them, as if the police were not an integral part of the school district. The disciplinary actions allowed by schools are not viewed as punishments by courts.
For instance, consider Miranda Rights. All citizens have a right against self incrimination. Your school district has found a legal loophole that allows it to deny your child his/her constitutional right against self incrimination. Since students are subjects of the school system, rather than citizens, Katy ISD has issued this policy "State law that applies to law enforcement officers in interrogating juveniles does not apply to public school administrators in their enforcement of discipline. Miranda warnings do not apply to school disciplinary proceedings." This is a convenient way for Katy ISD to control your child and absolve itself of the responsibility of providing a Miranda warning. You see, Miranda warnings are only required by law when police make an arrest.
Here is what will happen to 20% of the students in a typical Katy ISD junior high or high school: The principal will interrogated your child. (S)he will be coerced into incriminating him/herself without being allowed the right against self incrimination. Your child will be disciplined (read punished) for "hindering an investigation" if (s)he tries to assert his/her rights. Then after tricking your child into saying something incriminating they will call in their very own police to write your child a ticket or arrest him/her. The police would have been required to advise your child of his/her rights before asking the very same questions, or any court would reject prosecution. (This is another loophole. The police only have to have to issue a Miranda warning as required by law, while making an arrest, but even without the Miranda warning your child still has the right not to say anything to the police that may incriminate him/herself. A point not mentioned in the court opinions that I have read is that even if a child, being under age, is read his Miranda rights, it would not be fair to expect him/her to understand the consequences of a few seeming harmless words.
Parents should be present before any interrogations in order to protect his/her child, in spite of the Katy ISD policy that reads: "Principal ordinarily shall make reasonable efforts notify parents. If the interviewer raises what the principal considers to be a valid objection to the notification, parents will not be notified.". And then after all of this is done and punishments have been decided, the school will contact you and inform you that your son or daughter is in trouble with the law. There is a high probability that your child will be sent to DAEP.
You will have to deal with the law in a criminal court in order to be afforded due process. Meanwhile, the school will go ahead and punish your child immediately regardless of the outcome of your court case. All accused students will be disciplined no matter what. The school knows that due process in a court of law will almost always take so long that even if the court decided completely in your favor, it would be too late. It really doesn't matter what the outcome of court proceeding is due to a ticket, even if the ticket was the cause of the punishment in the first place. That is completely separate from school discipline. Due process is self-extinguishing when the punishment is allowed to follow immediately after accusation.
OK, They Have Turned your Child In To the Police. Isn't that enough already?
If that is not enough, if your child is a member of a student organization, the school will require this (supposed student run) organization to impose it's own sanctions against your child. The fact is, the school does not have a right to do this because they didn't bestow these privileges in the first place. It would be up to the Student Council, National Honor Society, or Cheer Leaders, for example, to take away any of it's members privileges. They can only acted independently on their own by laws if they are privy to all the facts of the disciplinary case and are allowed their own due process free from interference by the principal. Is it legal for the school to interfere? It doesn't matter. It is wrong! Katy ISD has no conscience. Our School Board does not require a conscience for the position of principal.
No matter how I analyze it, I still conclude that KISD has abused its authority, power and our children. Katy ISD has abused it's authority that we parents have extended to them in proxy, over our children. They have lawyers to make sure that what they do is legal. Guess who pays their lawyers? You do. If you have to go to court to defend your child, you will be paying for all of the lawyers. The school district will happily spend all of your money on appeal after appeal. KISD does not have a conscience, and apparently neither do many of the people in power at KISD. We need school policies that enforce what is right, in spite of the lack of consciences, not just what is legal. We need policies to legalize what is right and forbid what is wrong.
We must not allow our schools to use the district's police as their very own personal strong arms that allows them to trample on our children's constitutional rights and our rights to raise our children.
© KatyZeroTolerance.com 2004
#2 Jordan Riak
on August 1, 2007 at 12:19 p.m.(Lafayette, CA | Unverified Name)
The writer of "The spank heard ’round the world" (August, 1 2007) neglected to pursue his own line of argument to its obvious conclusions. He asked, "why would some think that children...should...be given a punishment worse than most adults would receive?"
Now let's be honest, and let's be thorough. Spankings are not punishable offenses -- that is, when they are inflicted by adults on children. Our lawmakers were very careful about that. They wrote the applicable statutes using such vague, subjective language that spankers must land a child in the hospital or worse before they've crossed the invisible line. Moreover, when adults in positions of authority, including teachers in 21 states of the US where paddling is still legal, smack children on the buttocks, the act is deemed beneficial and is widely applauded. When children engage in exactly the same behavior, however, it's called "sexual battery," and a nationwide hue and cry goes up to "lock up the little perverts!" Do I detect an element of hypocrisy in all this, or am I missing something?
Jordan Riak, Exec. Dir., Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education (PTAVE); Web site: "Project NoSpank" at www.nospank.net
#3 Eric Uthus
on August 1, 2007 at 1:47 p.m.(UW Campus | Unverified Name)
Yeah, sometimes I begin to rant and forget to answer the point I'm trying to make haha. I appreciate the response Jordan, you make a valid point.
#4 D.J.
on August 1, 2007 at 2:35 p.m.(None, None | Unverified Name)
This should've been handled by the parents and the school. This DA isn't playing with a full deck, and I hope the voters remember that at election time.
#5 LR
on August 1, 2007 at 3:42 p.m.(UW Campus | Unverified Name)
I think if parents took a more active roll in their children's lives, these kinds of events would be avoided. My parents taught me the difference between right and wrong and they helped me to understand that certain behavior was not appropriate. Most parents I've seen don't bother to discipline their children. Without boundaries, the children act up even more when they are away from home. Maybe the parents should spend some quality time with their kids and receive some detention with them.
#6 MacMom
on August 4, 2007 at 12:23 a.m.(Portland, OR | Unverified Name)
Every bit of information above has generated from the accused. None comes from the girls who are the named victims in the crimes charged. If your 13 year old daugter was walking down the hall at school and was jumped by 2 boys who grabbed her breasts and buttocks, then mounted her and simulated sex, what would you think should happen to the boys? It is not true that they face subsantial incarceration. They are charged with sex abuse in the third degree. If adults, the crimes they are charged with would be misdemeanor offences. Since the district attorney only charged them as juveniles, they are not even "crimes". They are not facing substantial, if any, detention time. The hope is that they will get couselling. This story is the result of a defence attorney using the media to inflame the public while the state must stand silent as they answer to a higher ethical standard (Bar/Press Guidelines). While the accused fly the media circuit, is anyone suprized that the parents of these young girls do not trot them out to appear on the O'Riley factor to talk about their experience as victims of sexual assualt? Is that what you would do if it was your daughter? This is why we have judges... to listen to the WHOLE STORY and make reasoned decisions. Thank god we don't leave these decsions to the gossip mongers who have taken up the gontlet in this case.
#7 RG
on August 9, 2007 at 7:24 a.m.(Denver, CO | Unverified Name)
This is the result of the 30 year witch hunt by the politically correct feminists attack on the patriarchy.
There were 14 children involved and all of them where doing the samething to each other, boys and girls. If it is a crime than all of them are victims and perps at the same time. This simple truth shows the absurdity of the whole thing.
#8 LRD
on October 8, 2007 at 12:58 p.m.(Hemphill, TX | Unverified Name)
Along this same line, I have found that my high school has imposed a $15 fine on my student because her cell phone rang in class. I find it hard to believe that this is legal. Anyone have any thoughts on this matter?
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