Outrage over Seven Hills West Public School putting autistic children in cage

From News.com.au (Australia):

A SYDNEY primary school that pens children with autism in a fenced area at lunchtimes should be investigated for human rights violations, the New South Wales Opposition says.

Parents with children at Seven Hills West Public School are angry that pupils with special needs are placed inside a fenced enclosure that has one tree, a bench and a dirt floor.

But the NSW Department of Education has defended the enclosure, saying it is used for new students with disabilities if they require more intense supervision while they adjust to school.

The school has 52 students with special needs.

School Calls in Bomb Squad To Inspect Kid’s Science Project

Absolute insanity… and a total lack of any type of common sense or critical thinking on the parts of all the adults involved. I think it’s especially nice that they decided not to prosecute the kid. Also, just what type of school policies did he violate? Bringing some type of functional science project to a science fair? Having electronic components?

From NoOneHasToDieTomorrow.com:

Slashdot points us to the story of an 11-year-old student who tried to build his own motion-detector system as a science project, and when he brought it to school to show people, school officials thought it was a bomb and freaked out.

They called the police, evacuated the school and all of the expected chaos followed. Law enforcement even brought in a robot to examine the device, and the student’s house was searched for explosives (none found, of course). After all of this (and it was said that the student and his parents were “very cooperative” throughout the ordeal) you might think the family deserves an apology. Instead:

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent….

I’m trying to figure out what “policies” could have been violated, and why it would require that he and his parents get counseling. It wasn’t the kid who did anything wrong. It was the school officials who freaked out. Perhaps they should be the ones to seek counseling?

Teacher’s aides accused of waterboarding special-needs student

We used to have one of the best education systems in the world. Then we got the deliberate dumbing down of Americans, starting in the education system. Now, we have this. Way to go.

From Raw Story:

Political observers like The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan have argued that one of the most dangerous elements of the Bush administration’s torture policies was the risk that a “torture mentality” would take hold in American society.

Those who seek evidence for that theory need look no further than Great Falls, Montana, where two teacher’s aides have been charged with using water torture on a middle school student.

Julie Ann Parrish and Kristina Marie Kallies face one count each of felony abuse after allegations that they forced a 13-year-old autistic boy’s head under water after he fell asleep in class. They also stand accused of “forcing him to sit in his soiled pants for hours and making him eat his own vomit when he got sick,” reports KTLA in Los Angeles.

“If the teachers thought Garrett was being lazy or falling asleep at his desk, they forcibly took my son to the kitchen sink in the room and forced his head under the water while he was screaming for his mother,” Tifonie Schilling, mother of the alleged victim, told ABC News. “And if he had an accident in his pants he was made to sit in it all day. They would taunt him and say, ‘You stink like a baby.'”

“They were waterboarding my son,” Schilling said.

Cub Scout utensil gets boy, 6, school suspension

I can’t begin to describe how completely absurd this is. Zero tolerance == zero common sense.

From MSNBC.com:

First-grader brought it to eat his lunch with; now he’s facing reform school

By Mike Celizic

TODAYShow.com contributor

updated 2 hours, 46 minutes ago

Dressed in a button-down shirt and tie and speaking calmly and articulately, first-grader Zachary Christie hardly looks or acts like the sort of kid who should be spending 45 days in reform school. But, thanks to a zero-tolerance policy, that’s where Zachary’s Delaware school system wants him to go after he made the mistake of taking his favorite camping utensil to school.

A Swiss Army-type combination of fork, spoon, bottle opener and knife, the tool has been Zachary’s favorite ever since he got it to take on Cub Scout camping expeditions. “He eats dinner with it, breakfast and everything else, so it never occurred to him that this would have been something wrong to do,” the 6-year-old’s mother, Debbie Christie, told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Tuesday from Newark, Del.

‘Can I have that?’
Zachary, an A student who sometimes wears a shirt and tie to school just because he likes to, told Vieira he put the tool in his pocket on Sept. 29 for a very simple reason: “To eat lunch with. I had absolutely no idea this was going to happen. I wasn’t thinking about this. I was thinking about having lunch with it.”

But when the tool fell out of his pocket on the bus and he walked off the vehicle with it in his hand, a teacher intercepted him. “She said, ‘Can I have that?’ ” Zachary recalled.

What Zachary didn’t realize was that he had fallen afoul of the Christina School District’s zero-tolerance policy toward weapons in school, one of many such policies implemented in the wake of such incidents as the Columbine High School massacre. The policy does not allow teachers or administrators to take into account intentions or the character of the student; if a student has a knife, suspension and subsequent assignment to the district’s “alternative placement school” — aka reform school — is mandatory.

Racial issue
Christina, which, according to its Web site, is the largest school district in Delaware with some 17,000 students, made its policy zero-tolerance because of concerns over racial discrimination. Studies have shown in other districts that when school officials are given discretion over such cases, African-American students are disciplined at a disproportionately high rate.

TODAY A combination fork, knife, spoon and bottle opener is Zachary Christie’s favorite utensil — but it got him in trouble at school.

“The idea was to avoid discriminating against any student and to treat all students the same,” George Evans, president of the Christina school board, told NBC News.

While some experts favor such zero-tolerance policies, others question their efficacy, saying there is no indication that they cut down on violent incidents in schools. One of them, national school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, told NBC News, “The school administrators have to be able to administer consequences and still have some discretion to fit the totality of the circumstances.”

The totality of Zachary’s circumstances was that he had no idea that it was wrong to take his favorite camping tool to class. When the teacher asked for it when he got off the bus, he handed it over, unaware that he was already in serious trouble. He went to class while his principal called his mother.

“She said that I needed to come to the school immediately; that Zachary had brought a dangerous weapon into school, and I needed to come and pick him up. He would be suspended for five days pending a disciplinary action committee hearing. She said that he had a knife,” Christie told Vieira.

TODAY Zachary spoke to TODAY along with his mother, Debbie Christie, and her fiance, Lee Irving.

When his mother arrived at the John R. Downes Elementary School with her fiance, Lee Irving, Zachary was called from his first-grade classroom to join them.

“When they called my name up, I was like, ‘Uh-oh,’ ” he said.

Home school, not reform school
Zachary was suspended immediately for five school days. At the end of the suspension, he and his mother appeared before the district’s disciplinary action committee, where his principal and others spoke up for his good character. It didn’t matter. The committee’s hands were tied. The rules said he had brought a knife to school and would have to spend 45 days in the reform school.

Christie decided she would not send her son to that school. Instead, she has been home schooling Zachary while waiting for an opportunity to address the district’s board of education, which was to meet Tuesday night.

“I understand why they have it, but I don’t agree with the implementation of it,” Christie said of the zero-tolerance policy. “I think they need to look at the age, maturity, intent, situation; bring in the teachers who know the child or the principal, and allow them to make the first call in these situations,” she said. “Looking at other schools’ codes of conduct in the Delaware Valley, their first step would have been a suspension.”

Christie assured Vieira that her son is well aware of the necessity of not taking anything new to school without first asking and is not a threat to anyone. She hopes the school board will agree with her.

More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation

In other words, they’re spending too much time with their families, and not enough in government run indoctrination centers (schools).

From Yahoo! News:

By LIBBY QUAID

WASHINGTON – Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.

“Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,” the president said earlier this year. “Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

“Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll.

But she doesn’t want a longer school day. “I would walk straight out the door,” she said.

Domonique Toombs felt the same way when she learned she would stay for an extra three hours each day in sixth grade at Boston’s Clarence R. Edwards Middle School.

“I was like, `Wow, are you serious?'” she said. “That’s three more hours I won’t be able to chill with my friends after school.”

Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools. Early results are positive. Even reluctant Domonique, who just started ninth grade, feels differently now. “I’ve learned a lot,” she said.

Does Obama want every kid to do these things? School until dinnertime? Summer school? And what about the idea that kids today are overscheduled and need more time to play?

___

Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

“Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Duncan told the AP. “I want to just level the playing field.”

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

___

Regardless, there is a strong case for adding time to the school day.

Researcher Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution looked at math scores in countries that added math instruction time. Scores rose significantly, especially in countries that added minutes to the day, rather than days to the year.

“Ten minutes sounds trivial to a school day, but don’t forget, these math periods in the U.S. average 45 minutes,” Loveless said. “Percentage-wise, that’s a pretty healthy increase.”

In the U.S., there are many examples of gains when time is added to the school day.

Charter schools are known for having longer school days or weeks or years. For example, kids in the KIPP network of 82 charter schools across the country go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., more than three hours longer than the typical day. They go to school every other Saturday and for three weeks in the summer. KIPP eighth-grade classes exceed their school district averages on state tests.

In Massachusetts’ expanded learning time initiative, early results indicate that kids in some schools do better on state tests than do kids at regular public schools. The extra time, which schools can add as hours or days, is for three things: core academics — kids struggling in English, for example, get an extra English class; more time for teachers; and enrichment time for kids.

Regular public schools are adding time, too, though it is optional and not usually part of the regular school day. Their calendar is pretty much set in stone. Most states set the minimum number of school days at 180 days, though a few require 175 to 179 days.

Several schools are going year-round by shortening summer vacation and lengthening other breaks.

Many schools are going beyond the traditional summer school model, in which schools give remedial help to kids who flunked or fell behind.

Summer is a crucial time for kids, especially poorer kids, because poverty is linked to problems that interfere with learning, such as hunger and less involvement by their parents.

That makes poor children almost totally dependent on their learning experience at school, said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Baltimore‘s Johns Hopkins University, home of the National Center for Summer Learning.

Disadvantaged kids, on the whole, make no progress in the summer, Alexander said. Some studies suggest they actually fall back. Wealthier kids have parents who read to them, have strong language skills and go to great lengths to give them learning opportunities such as computers, summer camp, vacations, music lessons, or playing on sports teams.

“If your parents are high school dropouts with low literacy levels and reading for pleasure is not hard-wired, it’s hard to be a good role model for your children, even if you really want to be,” Alexander said.

Extra time is not cheap. The Massachusetts program costs an extra $1,300 per student, or 12 percent to 15 percent more than regular per-student spending, said Jennifer Davis, a founder of the program. It received more than $17.5 million from the state Legislature last year.

The Montgomery County, Md., summer program, which includes Brookhaven, received $1.6 million in federal stimulus dollars to operate this year and next, but it runs for only 20 days.

Aside from improving academic performance, Education Secretary Duncan has a vision of schools as the heart of the community. Duncan, who was Chicago’s schools chief, grew up studying alongside poor kids on the city’s South Side as part of the tutoring program his mother still runs.

“Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” Duncan said. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

Big Brother alert: Sorry, but Obama’s planned address to nation’s schoolchildren is creepy

From The Examiner:

I think it’s wonderful that President Obama is making education a priority. And his bookish, pro-intellect personality is good for children to emulate (to a point). Certainly, his academic achievements are a paradigm for kids to aspire to.

But like President Bush’s, Obama’s first educational foray is an unwelcome one.

Bush, who also made education a priority, joined with Ted Kennedy to produce a truly horrendous piece of legislation in No Child Left Behind. NCLB is a well-intentioned disaster at best.

Obama’s initial educational push will be what he thinks he does best – a speech, likely read from a Teleprompter.

Obama is planning to address the all of the nation’s students on Tuesday, September 8, 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

I’m sorry, but the notion of a national address to schoolchildren creeps me out.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but it sparks within me thoughts of Big Brother’s looming head on a massive television screen, indoctrinating the hapless drones spread out before him.

The companion “Menu of Classroom Activities” released to pre-kindergarten through sixth graders by the Education Department in advance of what they are billing as “President Obama’s Address to Students Across America” does nothing to assuage my paranoia.

Before the speech, students are instructed to read books about Barack Obama. Teachers are asked to ask students “Why do you think he wants to speak to you?” referring to the President.

During the speech, students should think about the following “What is the President asking me to do?” and “What specific job is he asking me to do?” among other things.

After the speech, the questions that students should ponder include “Are we able to do what President Obama asks up to do?”

I’m sorry, but I don’t want the President of the United States asking or telling the kids of the United States to do anything. This isn’t 1950s China.

And what — exactly and precisely and specifically what — is the President going to be talking about during this address? The war? Healthcare reform? Voting issues?

Nobody knows, which is also scary.

The White House needs to be completely transparent beforehand about what the President intends to tell the kids of America.

Because if it’s anything other than “obey your parents and your teachers,” the President may well be out of line.

Parents should be aware and wary of mass indoctrination coming from any President and into the hearts and minds of impressionable little ones.

All parents to sign ‘behaviour contracts’

How long before the state just takes the children away from the parents, deciding that they are unable to properly raise and care for their own children? How are you supposed to ensure that your child is behaving, when you aren’t around to ensure that your child is behaving? And when any type of corporal punishment is considered “child abuse?”

From The Telegraph:

All parents will be forced to sign “contracts” to ensure their children behave at school, the Government has announced.

Pupils and their families will be required to agree to the deal – setting out minimum standards of behaviour and attendance – before the start of term. Contracts, known as Home School Agreements, will also establish parents’ responsibilities for the first time.

They face court action and possible fines of up to £1,000 for repeatedly breaking rules.

The contracts will become compulsory in all English state schools under plans laid out in a Government White Paper.

Ministers suggested that “good” parents would be able to complain about other mothers and fathers who fail to ensure their children behave.

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• Parents to be hit with penalties if children misbehave at school

• Parents to be made to sign school contracts

Read the rest:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5888788/All-parents-to-sign-behaviour-contracts.html