When I was a freshman in high school, more than forty years ago, one of the very “bad” kids had been given some punishment or other, resented it, and attacked the principal.
He managed to give him two black eyes before the assistant principal, who looked like a Marine drill sergeant, kneed the student in the groin, kicked him in the ribs, and then held him in a chokehold till the police got there. The cops gave him a whack or two with their nightsticks for good measure.
And then he was trundled off to jail. Here’s how the finely tuned educational philosophy of the day handled such cases. The kid was given a choice. Prison or join the army. This was not today’s high-tech, smart bomb, be-all-you-can be army. This was the old model army, at the beginning of the big push in Vietnam.
I assume the bad boy joined up, but I don’t really know. I do know he became a legend, remembered for years with a mixture of horror, awe and admiration, especially by the misfits.
We live in a different world now, where paddling is forbidden, kids are overmedicated, and the armed forces want high school and community college graduates, not the leavings of the legal system.
Yet what to do about kids who are out of control seems to be an even bigger problem than ever. Last week, the state board of education made a valiant attempt to address this by adopting standards to address the emergency use of seclusion and restraint.
Seclusion in my era meant being put in the closet for half an hour for talking in class. Well, it is clear you aren’t supposed to do that to kids any more. You have to put them in a well-lit room.
And as I read the policy, you aren’t supposed to hold anyone face down or in any way that prevents them from breathing.
But beyond that it isn’t at all clear what the policies mean. My work consists largely of reading things and trying to figure them out. Having read these policies, I would say it is impossible to figure out precisely what the rules on seclusion and restraint are.
What is clear is that the state board of education has no power to enforce these guidelines, and no money to offer schools to properly train personnel what to do in emergency situations. We aren’t talking inner city here. Some kid was nearly killed in white-bread suburban Livonia last month after a fight that started with a nasty cellphone text-message exchange.
What needs to happen is for the legislature to give the state board the power to really do something about these issues, and the money to get whatever necessary crisis management training done.
We live in a society with too much violence and too many tragedies. We owe it to ourselves to find a way to do our best to keep both to a minimum in our schools, by any means necessary.
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