How is a suspension that long even vaguely appropriate? At some point the school is just abandoning the kid and their future.
If the kid did it there needs to be a punishment, but surely education is a key part of what needs to happen?
If the kid did it there needs to be a punishment, but surely education is a key part of what needs to happen?
My sister had a classmate who ended up with a felony conviction for counterfeiting money, using a low-end HP OfficeJet and glueing two sides together as a joke. It was absurd, to the point the sentencing judge made his displeasure known.
(Says the misfit who befriended their SRO[school resource officer])
My beef is the chickenshit school people who escalate things out of laziness or malice. Heck, the teacher’s doubts made it into the article.
I think the police should deal with violence in school. Kids get assaulted at school in ways that would get the offender locked up if it happened in the street. School is somehow a law-free zone for a lot of offences.
The judge is free to dismiss the charge, if he thinks it's absurd. How did she end up with a conviction?
They can't willy-nilly decide not to sentence someone - they merely can hand out the minimum possible sentence (which may be no sentence at all) after finding the defendant guilty.
If the law is stupid and assholes are abusing it, there's little a judge can do[1] - unless they happen to be a constitutional court and can declare laws unconstitutional.
You'd need someone with the power to pardon or commute, which are powers generally only held by high ranking members of the executive.
[1] This depends on the country, but in some places judges are given greater freedom to interpret the 'intent' of the law as opposed to going by the letter. Sure, the kid technically made fake money, even if it was really shitty, but it clearly wasn't the intent of the law to criminalize what that kid did.
I did not say they didn't.
They may do so - may meaning they are allowed to - if it is obvious that there was no crime or there is insufficient evidence or there was a procedural error etc. (rules for this can vary greatly).
In this case that does not apply at all though.
Don't you think if the judge could just dismiss the charge they would have done so? Do you honestly believe you've got a better handle on the legalities of this than the person whose job this is?
The legalities are pretty clear; the judge is able to dismiss the case. I don't believe I know that more than the judge does; he also knew that he was legally able to dismiss the case.
Whether he exercises that power is a political question, not a legal question. But to this point:
> They may do so - may meaning they are allowed to - if it is obvious that there was no crime or there is insufficient evidence or there was a procedural error etc. (rules for this can vary greatly).
None of those is necessary. In the case I witnessed, the reasoning was quite obviously "the defendant is too young for this to make any sense", and the official statement was "the case is dismissed in the interest of justice".
In the US that is possible in only about 12-15 jurisdictions, depending on who's counting. Some explicitly spell out in which cases a judge may do so, others leave that power broadly undefined.
I wonder why, having seen that done once, you seem so insistent to extrapolate that judges everywhere and always must have that power.
http://volokh.com/2013/10/27/disciplinary-charges-filed-mess...
The lack of criminal charges in this case suggests the evidence isn't strong enough to support them, and it seems to me that similar standards should be applied to a long-term suspension or expulsion.
Also, if you think that 3 months out of 12 or so years of schooling will "abandon the kid and their future" than we should probably add years you have to go to school to minimise the effect of aggregated absence because of e.g. illness. Of course, 3 months of missed school are probably below any kind of measurability and natural and familiar influences are going to have a much higher bearing.
The kid is also probably not going to stay in a vacuum even when at home, it is definitely going to learn something on its own too. Maybe not something that will get it a better grade but most likely something rather useful in the real life.
How many sick days did you take as a kid? I'm pretty sure I didn't get close to 3 months in aggregate until I was out for a full month at once with mono in college. Missing three months all at once is very unusual and disruptive.
Anyway, the problem here is not the actual lost learning - we know that actual academic education is spotty at best in American schools. The problem is that relatively small disturbances to the happy-path of social and bureaucratic progression as a kid can have outsize effects because of path dependence, and he's now tagged as A Problem Child forever. He will never, ever get the benefit of the doubt. He'll likely have subtle social difficulties because kids will look at him funny. To the extent that school is meant as a gentle introduction to how to deal with other people in the "real" world, his is pretty well fucked.
Maybe it will "be a problem child" forever. Maybe it will actually learn to be more assertive thanks to that and either end up in jail or as a high performing employee or founder. Nobody knows and it really depends. The happy-path of social and bureaucratic progression as a kid could be to develop some thick skin early. The school in the general case is a very harsh introduction to the real world. More often than not, kids are mean to each other. Either you develop some elbows or you are generally loved or you like most kids somehow make it through.
Either way, it could be, the parents of that kid would or will move to a different city altogether and socially start from scratch.
“School to prison pipeline” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
Even the kid and his family in the article says he liked the school
“ Malachi said he liked Couch Middle School before his suspension. Science class was his favorite because he liked the teacher, whom he is accused of bombarding with racial slurs, and he liked the quiz games they played in class.”
And they also mention the struggles of this event
“ His 21-year-old aunt has been home schooling him while juggling a full course load at Kennesaw State University.
…
“It’s really hard for him to go through this and to be associated with such horrible words,” said Malachi’s grandmother, Gillian Gardener-Valbrun. “That is a stain.”
Malachi said he would feel uncomfortable returning to Couch, where his friends and classmates know what he is accused of.“
Why would you assume to know better than the kid and his family on the impact of this?
Interested to see your evidence countering this.
I hope, this kid will like science after this whole thing is over still. It really seems, he was wrongly accused (as in the movie The Fugitive with Harrison Ford) and it is nice the family is trying to give him support.
In general, today's kids might work on their projects while at home. I have a colleague, who was sick at home for a long time and he basically learned to program the computer during that time. He has written a game, learned recursion and other concepts on his own and much more. He almost certainly wouldn't have learned the same at school. He programs professionally now, has a PhD. in math and worked at Google. It really depends on the family, the child and the school of course (in case of absence for whatever reason, this has less influence).