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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

What drove me crazy about K-12 is that all the bullshit zero tolerance policies affected mainly the normal kids. The real problem kids didn’t care, and continued to wreak havoc. It’s the main reason I send my kids to private school, even though the public schools where I live are good.

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A student whose situation I’m personally aware of was threatened with expulsion during middle school after a history of being an undistinguished but not particularly troublesome student for a) doodling a bobomb (character from Mario) in their notebook during class and b) filling in a speech bubble saying “Let’s blow up the school.” Zero tolerance policy; bomb threat.

It took substantial efforts by a parent to keep them in school, including begging, pleading, and threatening a PR campaign along the lines of “I will personally call every mother at this school and break down in their living room about how you ruined my son’s life” to get him reinstated.

The school was, obviously, neither bobombed nor hit with a turtle shell nor stomped on.

>doodling a bobomb (character from Mario) in their notebook during class and b) filling in a speech bubble saying “Let’s blow up the school.” Zero tolerance policy; bomb threat.

My school forced us to show IDs to get on the bus home. I got in school suspension* for saying something to the effect of if I were going to bring a bomb I wouldn't forget my ID. This was almost 20 years ago so I guess I got off light. I still remember how ridiculous it all was and more ridiculous that my parents sided with the school.

*Essentially all day long detention. Sit in a room, no talking, do work

That reminds me of an instance where a not-too-bright fellow was stressed out about some exam. He strapped a LED blinker to a clock and a box with rocks, put it at the basement floor corridor and informed teachers about a bomb he "found just laying there".

Everyone was evacuated. A bomb squad had to come from 90km away to disarm it. The kid was expelled after he admitted doing it after questioning.

Moral of the story: don't teach kids about LED blinkers.

It seems the only reasonable response by school authorities is to put teachers in bomb-vests to pre-emptively quash any bomb threat.

Obviously the environment is different now, but me and a few friends called in a bomb scare to our high school, got a day off while cops came and everyone was evacced to sports fields.

Got caught, suspended, and given a stern talking to by the cops, but no records or permanent consequences.

We’re all functional adults now, contributing to society, some in upper management roles, some heading up charities. A punitive approach would have made those stories impossible.

I don't think I'd make it in the current age. We routinely drove snowmobiles to school in the winter, parked across the street in an empty lot during hunting season so that our bird guns were locked up technically off of school property, and carried leathermans and swiss army knives every day as a matter of course. Kids were frigging dipping Grizzly into soda bottles in the back of the class room most days.

People would have a conniption fit now, and this was only when Bush II was in office.

> dipping Grizzly into soda bottles

What does this mean?

Pretty sure that's referring to chewing tobacco (Grizzly is a brand), and spitting it into empty soda bottles (because it has to go somewhere.)

chewing tobacco.

I think your geography had more impact than your era. Is your hometown much different than this today? Seems like the normal rural vs urban divide to me.

> I don't think I'd make it in the current age.

Or any other country (besides Russia/USSR?). That doesn’t sound like an average childhood at all.

I grew up US rural and this checks out with me. I'm sure not every rural community had this era, but I bet a large number did.

(I highly doubt it's still like this.)

Welcome to the poorer rural areas of the united states

Curious where you got 'poorer' out of that. I'm a city boy all my life, but I've driven the country quite a few times - I could picture the Grizzly dip guy with guns and snowmobiles being in Wyoming .. https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/wyoming/

I bet they respected the teachers at least.

> It’s the main reason I send my kids to private school

I was sent to a private school for jr. high, and it was a shit show that severely derailed my education at the time.

Unbeknownst to my well-meaning parents, it turned out the private school was where parents of abusive troublemaker bullies sent their kids after their barely having passed public school, as the last option before military school.

There were quite a few years where I wanted to murder the administrators at the school and my parents because they were entirely incompetent and in my eyes responsible for creating this abusive situation I was forced into, for no apparent reason other than religious beliefs (it was a catholic school, catholic parents).

I really hated that. It’s a system that punished people who were trying to do the right thing.

My kids' middle school had a similar problem. For example, three kids out of a hundred would cause a problem during lunch, so all hundred kids in the grade had to sit in alphabetical or some pre-determined order for the rest of the year. My kids said everyone including the teachers and kids knew who was causing the problem, but everyone had to pay for it. I think the school was afraid to single out the "trouble makers" (they were just throwing food or yelling or some other typical bs) and contact their parents, so they just made all the kids pay for it.

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

Students who engage in serious misconduct, or repeated disruptive conduct will be “counseled out.” But private schools are generally small, closed communities, which creates a high level of trust and allows routine misunderstandings and disputes to be resolved reasonably. Also, there are strong disincentives to “going nuclear” for both the school and the parents. The schools obviously stand to lose revenue, but the parents also stand to lose their monetary and social investment into the school.

As shared by a friend of mine recently:

Well, my kid screwed up! She took a multitool to school. It has a knife blade. I'm sure every student will go home and tell their parents that someone had a knife at school. Which is true, and only part of the story.

I am glad she is at a private school, where she was only suspended for the day, vs at a public school with an onduty police officer, where she would have been formally charged and entered into the 'system' (a discussion for another time, but this is one problem I have with SRO and the criminalizing of students for minor offenses and how that leads the schools into a pipeline to prisons).

Suspended for the day; sure I guess that’s “reasonable.”

Personally, my wife and I are glad to have homeschooled our kids.

Wait.. there are resident police officers in schools in USA?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_resource_officer

> In the late 1990s, SRO presence on campuses again increased after the Department of Justice created a $750 million grant program, Cops in School, to hire over 6,500 SROs.

https://txssc.txstate.edu/topics/law-enforcement/articles/br...

"Normal country", as they say. Gotta keep the school-to-prison pipeline pumping.

Alternatively, as was the case at my private high school, the small, closed community creates a high level of trust and allows truly awful behavior to be papered over and worked around, because that can line up with the incentives of the community.

Or you could be at an elite private high school, rightly upset about aspects of it, but aware that something which strikes a 14 year old as a pointless abuse of power might actually be the grit for which penicillin and the structure of DNA are the pearls, and desperately hoping that the pervasive homophobia falls in the former category.

Being at a private school won’t stop e.g. kids from being expelled for being caught a single time with a small amount of pot, as happened to my cousin and several of his friends. I guess at least they weren’t referred to the police?

Plenty of zero-tolerance bullshit at (extremely ritzy and exclusive... or any other type of) private schools too.

It’s not like being unaccountable to the local government makes school administrators stop power tripping.

I'd imagine there's a more direct financial incentive; if a student's parent(s) decide(s) to pull that student out of school because of a disagreement with the school's administration, then that directly leads to less money for the school.

Meanwhile, a public school doesn't have that direct penalty; if anything, it's just one less student in already-crowded classrooms, so pushing a student out might very well be a net positive.

> a public school doesn't have that direct penalty

That is false

You are correct. Public schools lose funding when enrollment drops but the magnitude of the funds lost and the degree to which those funds affect the total budget of the school is usually much greater at a private school.

> the magnitude of the funds lost and the degree to which those funds affect the total budget of the school is usually much greater at a private school

This is false

Usually they have the policies, but choose not to enforce them. The rule is there so they can expel or severely punish kids at their discretion, but typically don't want to because that represents lost revenue if the kid leaves.

The biggest pressures on school administrators and teachers are parents through direct screaming and anger, not politics. If you want to have a good schooling environment, make sure to put a parent sized amount of support behind teachers that are good, even when they come to you and tell you little jimmy is being a right asshole and needs to be disciplined

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