If you’re a high school student and help donate a bunch of your grandmother’s household items to Goodwill, make sure you don’t let a 10-inch unserrated bread knife fall out of a box into the bed of your pick-up. A school security guard might notice it and report you, and then, the next thing you know, you might be expelled from your high school, banned from setting foot there for a year, and sent to school with all the druggies and criminals.
At least that’s what happened to Taylor Hess.
H-E-B district officials maintained throughout the Hess hearing that students’ safety must be the overriding factor in any situation where a weapon is found on campus.
“I do feel he [Hess] put students at risk, whether he knowingly did that or not,” Dianne Byrnes, H-E-B director of alternative education programs, said at the hearing.
Speaking of putting students at risk, another incredibly goofy aspect of many schools ZT policy on medications is forcing asthmatics to keep their emergency inhalers in the school nurse’s office, rather than at hand, as this Reason magazine article discusses.
I spoke to Ivanhoe’s then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I’d been “breaking the law” for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would “confiscate” it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. “So now what we need to do,” he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, “is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law.” My arguments about doctor’s orders went nowhere. “When your daughter is at school,” Principal Baker said, “I am the ultimate authority concerning her health.”
Yeah. That makes me feel much better. Especially as the article describes many cases of mishandling of meds in school offices (especially since school nurses are, these days, rare than hen’s teeth).
And, for those who don’t already get it, it can also be a matter of life and death — a lesson that shouldn’t be lost on paranoid school districts.
In her letter to the Bristol Township School Board, Nancy Sander referred to the 1991 death of a New Orleans high school student, Catrina Lewis, who was delayed by security guards before being allowed to get her inhaler from the office. When it didn’t help, she asked school staff to call an ambulance; instead they spent a half-hour trying to call her mother first. Catrina’s sister, another student, finally called 911 herself, but emergency help arrived too late. In 1996, a New Orleans judge ordered Lawless High School’s acting principal, a school counselor, and the school board to pay $1 million in damages to Catrina’s family.
“When your daughter is at school,” Principal Baker said, “I am the ultimate authority concerning her health.”
it was that mentality that caused me to pull my children out of public school for 2 years until my husband moved us to this town where I felt comfortable to send them to this school district.
The principal had told me when they walk through that door they are mine until they reach your front door. I freaked and pulled them out 2 days later. My children belong to no one but my husband and I period!
There is a concept called _in loco parentis_ which basically means that the school acts as parents while the kids are in their care. That’s only practical in most cases. But it’s something that needs to be handled with a large dollop of diplomacy, and it’s something that cannot trump actual parental desires when expressed, except in much more significant circumstances than this.