Junior High School Girl Arrested for Doodling on Desk
This incident occurred earlier this month but I’m at a loss for words! It’s mind boggling to me why a principal felt it was necessary to have a 12-year-old arrested for doodling on a classroom desk. Read the story below from CNN:
There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10
” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.
Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.
Alexa’s hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and — the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl — her classmates.
“They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn’t believe it,” Alexa recalled. “I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person.”
Wow!! So the issue now is zero tolerance policies at schools. How far is too far? Personally, I think it’s ridiculous and totally uncalled for to arrest a student over doodling on a desk. Detention? Maybe. I think anything other than that is out of line. Also, I think it’s a waste of the police department’s time especially when they can be focusing on REAL crimes. What are your thoughts? You can read the rest of the article here.
February 20th, 2010 at 6:24 am
Zero tolerance policies must be challenged, right now! They give a green light to terrorize rather than teach children. Children should be able to feel safe and cared about at school. We want our school administrators to be positive role-models. If they cannot figure out how to respond proportionally and age-appropriately to unacceptable behavior, then they should get a different job. (I hear there’s an opening in Singapore flogging people who spit their gum out on the sidewalk.) This little girl could have been told to clean the desk (she used erasable ink; what a smart and considerate child!). She could have been told to stay after school to wash the whole room of desks. This would have educated her to the labor involved in cleaning everyone’s doodles off of the desks. Had she damaged the desk, she could have been given the repair bill – a good wake-up call to the value of furniture. Any one of those proportional disciplinary methods would have provided a “teachable moment.” And, she would have seen how adults with functional brains deal appropriately and kindly with minor infractions of school policy. ?Are we paying our public school principals to give higher priority to the well-being of a piece of furniture than to that of a child? Why have we, Americans living in the land of free public education and the home of civil liberties, allowed zero-tolerance fascism to become part of our educational system? We replaced teachable discipline opportunities with police action. I am not comforted hearing that police will now be using velcroe handcuffs on our babies instead of metal ones. Terrorising and torturing children by employing a punitive system designed to detain and punish adult criminal behavior must cease and desist. This girl will be forever scarred by this trauma. I hope her mother will not put this behind her; I hope she has the strength and support to fight for her child and for all of our children. Zero-discernment, zero-empathy, zero-accountability policies must be abandoned immediately. It is time for all of us to stand up and show zero tolerance for institutionalized child abuse and terrorism against our babies.