Fresno High tracks student bathroom visits with app. Not everyone likes it
fresnobee.com
fresnobee.com
Schools have to make kids do stuff that just isn't fun, without paying them or offering any real incentives (other than grades, which only count in the last year), so they need to make sure kids don't have excuses to shirk.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-san...
Hall monitors did this for generations.
The majority of US schools report struggling to hire paraprofessionals.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-bad-are-school-staffin...
> That would be the labor I'm referring to.
The generations of hall monitors were students. They're free.
Do you really think other students are best equipped to deal with students having sex, doing drugs, or devious licks in the bathrooms?
And in any case, the hall monitors are probably better off in class instead of being unpaid labor.
Dumb parallel: Some people litter or jaywalk! We could probably address this by implanting GPS trackers in everybody, but... should we?
Learning isn't fun doesn't really relate to the fact that bodily functions exist. If a kid is well but going to the restroom for 30 minutes every class period and on their phone etc just skipping.... I guess punish that as if it were skipping? You can't just assume negative intent across the entire student body when it comes to checks notes pooping in a toilet like a person?
No. That is not the function of schools!
Kids are full of energy and interest. A good teacher, combined with a well-designed syllabus and a good teaching plan, will then engage the kids. Of course, the lessons have to match the students' abilities.
A HUGE mistake is to compel students to do work that they haven't learned how to do. This mistake was inflicted on me by my maths teacher at a good private school - nominally a very good maths teacher, author or contributor to a number of school maths textbooks. I routinely had my homework returned as "wrong", but I wasn't taught how to do it right. As a consequence, I suffered a 5-year-long mental block in maths.
It sounds like Fresno schools are being run by concentration-camp commandants.
[Edit] OK, so some kids aren't wide-eyed and keen to engage, whether because of earlier school experiences or because of other experiences. Why compel those kids to go to school at all? You can't force kids to study (no, not even with apps!), so why force them to go to school?
I think that at least here in the UK, it's to do with keeping a lid on the numbers of unemployed; and with relieving working parents of childcare duties, so they can do jobs to pay their taxes.
If school's about compelling students to do what they don't want to do, then obviously schools have to engage in coercive measures, like tracking apps and metal detectors. But why stop there? Why not go ahead and shackle them to their desks?
Many US schools already have 20ft-high fences around them, like prisons. How is being imprisoned conducive to learning?
Am I downvoted because people really think students are feral monsters, that need to be locked up whether they're learning or not? Is it possible that imprisoning schoolkids makes them more interested in escaping than learning? What kind of parent would send their kids to prison?
Afterward he never refused any request I made for anything.
The idea that you can do this to students without some biohazard cleanup is absurd. It's also just another way America deals with education issues by dealing with everything but the issue. If the issue is students falling behind, it's not because half of the high school class is going to vape in the bathroom. It's because school starts too damn early, kids don't retain info over the summer, and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.
We could deal with those things, but that would mean the sports teams have to practice later, get over the idea that kids don't help their families plant in the summer, and deal with socioeconomic factors, respectively.
And that's, like, hard, man.
> If the issue is students falling behind, it's ... because school starts too damn early,
Yes.
> kids don't retain info over the summer,
Yes.
> and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.
Yes. Fully compounded by the utter lack of access to brain building, adultless, free range time+area.
source: father of five
The entrance exam was populated with HS grads and me. I was from the final generation with constant access to adult-free + free range hours. Everyone else was in the early wave of kids with locked-down, 24/7 adulted childhoods.
Their education was comparable to mine - in quality, behavior etc (my kids attended their schools).
I was one of a handful that didn't have to start off with remedial classes.
I also know that there was a large group of kids, generally poorer performing students, who used "bathroom break" as a get-out-of-class-for-10-or-20-minutes each period as a freebie that they will always use.
The teachers aren't dumb. They know which kids are abusing the system. And they know these kids will shamelessly look you in the eyes and say "I have to take a shit, I must go to the bathroom" and then go fuck around for 10 or 20 minutes.
Little Johnny's parents say, you are unfairly targeting our child. Allege discrimination.
That is how you get here.
Students will often abuse this privilege (assumption of good faith) to go to the bathroom to escape the strict classroom environment, to socialize with their peers, or do whatever they want. The school sees this as a challenge to their authority so they crack down as in TFA.
(Never mind the fact that schools are making a smelly room with toilets and a sink a more attractive place to be than the classroom for some students is itself sickening to the core.)
Edit: I'm not one to complain about downvotes, but this time I don't get it. Am I wrong? These are things I've observed in a variety of schools, and in relatively well-off areas at that. I'd imagine the problems are far more acute in areas of lower socioeconomic status.
As someone who was actually bullied and not heard about it, maybe that's a US thing but to me that never happened in bathrooms and always in the open when teachers were not around.
For me the problem was that most schools are all about memorization and thinking inside the box. Switching to a different type of school solved my issues. (smaller classes, more permissive, exploring problems and their solutions with multiple correct answers rather than simply 'memorize this thing, check the box').
That's a money issue, not a system issue.
At my local HS the answer was to close most of the bathrooms during class time and monitor visits, since putting live cameras in the bathrooms would cause an even larger uproar. Students always had access to a bathroom during class time, just one up near the admin offices that could be more closely observed.
'Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.'
>"A large part of the school's job is to prepare students for work, we want you to be in class on time because if you show up late all the time to work, they're not going to hire you,"
My current job has me getting here at 8 AM.
Most Europeans have no idea what a "hall monitor" is and teachers don't have such obsessive control over their students use of toilet facilities. The schools I went to were not perfect and yet all students had to do was raise a hand and ask for permission to leave the classroom.
At my high school, we had a city police officer doing this. (Not continuously, but she was always around looking to catch students breaking the law.)
Of course this officer was fully armed with a pistol, taser, and pepper spray.
He was there to quickly call for police presence when once a large fight broke out, but that was about it.
They didn’t give the kid proper training, but not a gun, taser or pepper spray.
Seems reckless in hindsight. /s
And SROs absolutely do escalate to the criminal justice system (e.g. juvenile detention) when necessary. There are occasionally guns, knives, drugs, and violence in schools, and those are situations where the legal system is frequently involved.
The bottom line is that a student hall monitor is going to be able to snitch on an otherwise good kid who is goofing off in the hall, but they're not going to be able to deal with more serious issues. And it would be a very bad idea to rely on them as the front-line workers for more serious issues.
If it's in good faith, yes, certainly. Every privilege is abused sometimes. I fully expect to break the speed limit on the way to work today, because my car doesn't have a governor installed. Turn me in, I beg you.
To address what I perceive as the issue you raise, so what? If someone needs to hit the head (nausea, diarrhea, something) they need to go. If an act of elimination takes longer than what some uptight school administrator decides is necessary, so what? We as a society tolerate some small abuse so that everything else functions well.
Or maybe not having pee on their floor is a privilege the school enjoys, one that could be taken away by a student at any time.
The point is that if push comes to shove, the students are going to win this one every time, so it cannot really be a privilege, can it?
Using the restroom isn't a privilege, but being able to wander the halls unsupervised is.
At university level nobody is checking attendance anyways. You go to classes/lectures if you think you need them. There's no points awarded for the mere fact that you showed up or for anything occurring in the course of them. Here controlling bathroom breaks would be beyond farcical.
It's funny, because out of the tens of thousands of students my mom taught over 30 years, the students that misbehaved pretty regularly came from parents that enthusiastically punished their child with violence.Those kids always loved her though, because she was firm and strict but also very maternal. She regularly had kids that everyone else considered "bad students" or "trouble kids" behave, and actually LEARN things (and she taught french class FFS), to the point that those troublesome kids would often beg to come spend their study hall periods in her classroom and actually behave and do their homework.
There are a lot of shitty human beings in the American school system, because we pay garbage, so you don't become a teacher unless you have some ulterior motive. For many idealistic young people, they want to teach, but that gets metaphorically beaten out of them by petty administrative politics and dealing with all the shitty people who got the job by default because nobody else wants it and they just want to be a shithead to kids.
I shouldn't have to say this but not every physically abused kid will act out, and not every one will act out in the same way. Plenty of those kids were just desperate for someone to pay attention to them. Because we are social animals, and the people that think we should beat our kids are pretty bad at knowing that.
It seems like "some people love it" would be the MUCH more interesting (if not disturbing) story.
So that's going to be "Excuse me Miss, I can't run the app, because I don't bring a smartphone into class. Now can I please have a pee?"
> Fresno High is the latest school in the district to roll out the 5 Star Students app to regulate student trips outside classrooms during instructional periods. Students are limited to two seven-minute bathroom breaks during the day, and the app keeps track of the time they spend outside of classrooms.
I'd sure hate to be a student with IBS having to deal with this system.
> “Today, you know, it’s girls’ menstrual cycles, I went to the bathroom and I came back two minutes late,” she said. “Some teachers are more strict. For example, my math teacher, if we go past a certain amount of time then we just can’t go for the rest of the month.”
Or female. I wonder how much the school district is paying for this app.
And that's good thing, this is insane helicoptering.
These events show up every once in a while in the media.
Yet, these policies are nearly universal. These schools will go right back to doing the same thing after the attention dies down.
I have a personal anecdote from middle school where we had 4(!!!) minute breaks between classes. A teacher actually refused my entry into class after I was late coming from a PE class on the other side of the school complex.
So you had 4 minutes to use the restroom, change, and walk across the entire school. Some teachers/admins just need a good ole smack to their head.