Strip Searching and Other School House Lessons
April 22, 2009 by Julia King · Leave a Comment
Message to my fifteen-year-old daughter: if you put illicit ibuprofen in your underpants, the principal will find it. DON’T DO DRUGS.
This week the U.S. Supreme Court hears a case about a 13-year-old who was strip-searched at school in the ever-important and never-ending War on Drugs.
Isn’t it a little ironic that while some school administrators are busily fighting “sexting,” (the sending of erotic messages and photos on cell phones), others are disrobing pubescent girls in the nurse’s office? Yes. The answer is, “Yes, indeed. That’s ironic.”
It would be amusing, except that a living, breathing, developing human being was humiliated in the search for an ibuprofen. Okay, to be fair, it was EXTRA STRENGTH.
When IS it okay for a school official to strip search an 8th grader? Because most 13-year-olds would rather be water-boarded than strip searched, I’m going to go with a firm “never,” although I’m willing to consider exceptional scenarios that involve hidden explosives.
It’s forgivable (and even understandable) for an administrator to occasionally display bad judgment. Anyone who’s ever spent much time around middle schoolers can attest to the fact that they have an uncanny ability to bring out the worst in people. As a substitute teacher, I remember distinctly one eighth grade boy who decided it would be funny to “beep” all through math class. Mercifully, his peers found the behavior even more annoying than I did and he abandoned the game (before I had the presence of mind to search his nude body for electronic beeping devices). But his goal was typical of his age group – to push the buttons of authority figures, and the limits of good taste.
In the course of working with young people, in the course of trying to establish boundaries and guidelines, a slip-up now and then is to be expected. And when the stakes are high, like in the case of drugs or weapons, those errors in judgment can be correspondingly dramatic. Mistakes are a part of life, whether it’s the kid who thinks it’s cool to pass out anti-inflammatory pills in the cafeteria… or the assistant principal who thinks it’s cool to stop the behavior at all costs, including the cost of a young girl’s dignity. One bad call needn’t destroy an official’s career – or tarnish the reputation of an institution, or worse yet, an entire profession.
But according to the Christian Science Monitor, the National School Boards Association and the American Association of School Administrators filed a friend of the court brief in support of the school officials. Uh-oh. School administrators are staking out ground in favor of strip-searching 13-year-olds?? Maybe that’s the real story, the fact that there are professional associations — groups of men and women who deal with our children day in and day out — who are moved to defend, not a young girl whose underpants were peeked into at school – but their colleagues who made the decision to do it.
It’s bad enough that they even want that kind of authority (who in their right mind WANTS to be allowed to look into an 8th grader’s pants??); but what these administrators need to realize is that, regardless of what the Supreme Court rules, they can’t have the authority. Such acts, acts that tamper with the delicate psyches of girls and boys transitioning into adulthood, acts that are designed to take control over beings who desperately need to learn to control themselves, acts that are at their core about one individual looking past another… these are acts that can’t ever really be authorized. They can only be made legal (although I believe the Supreme Court will declare the strip search unconstitutional).
School administrators need not wait for external judgment; right now what they need is self-reflection.
Anti-tax “Tea Party” in Goshen
April 11, 2009 by Julia King · 5 Comments
It’s so much more relaxing visiting a protest than actually organizing one. As a visitor to a protest, all those people who wear the wrong clothes or make signs that are distractingly ill-conceived are entertaining. As an organizer of a protest, the goal is as much message cohesion as possible; but as a visitor, the presence of opposing political currents (like right-wing Christians and Libertarians, for instance) provides a nice undercurrent of interest. On the political Left, there are frequently too many drums and white guys with dreadlocks; on the political Right, there are too many flags and dirty baseball caps (and when I say “dirty,” I mean that they need to be washed, not that they are embroidered with naked ladies).
And so this morning I stood on the Elkhart County Courthouse lawn in Goshen as several hundred people (some with baseball caps, some with flags, and some with church flyers) threw a local version of the national anti-tax “Tea Party” that’s become all the rage on the Right. A lot of people who didn’t notice our dept or deficit or war expenditures when George W. Bush was in office are suddenly counting our collective pennies now that we’re talking about health care.
Have I mentioned that I like democracy? I do. I do like democracy. I love that Americans can congregate in public spaces and say anything they want (except “fire!” or “kill!” of course).
“Cut the fat!” read one sign (cleverly shaped like a pig). I approached the sign holder and asked her what, exactly, did she not want to pay for. She said she didn’t want to pay for things that “aren’t really necessary.” When I asked her about health care, she paused for quite a while. She wasn’t sure about that. Since she didn’t have insurance, she was iffy on that one. But she did not want to pay for some study about bird migrations, she said.
Midway through our conversation the prayer started, so we silenced ourselves to bow our heads and listen. The pastor at the microphone invoked Deuteronomy 28 and at one point mentioned “heathen nations” and at another point said we should be living as an “unabashedly Christian nation.” It was a long prayer.
I moved on through the crowd, taking note of a man’s “No Taxation without Representation!” sign. Was he from Washington, D.C. (where they really are taxed without representation)? Or was he just confused? Either way, the man (and the crowd) heard from Indiana state representative Wes Culver.
Culver speaks in sweeping terms, the way most good politicians do, but he isn’t afraid to utter specifics. Today he was the only one brave enough to make the real-world connection between taxes and government services. “If you don’t like taxes, don’t complain about potholes or the brush not being picked up on your street,” he said. (It would have been fair to add more items to that list of things not to complain about, including, but not limited to: your poorly educated kids, or when you have to file for bankruptcy because your health insurance runs out, or tainted milk products from China that end up on your table because regulators have been “cut back” along with the budget).
The people who congregated at the courthouse were there for a range of reasons, but they more-or-less agreed that taxes were too high (and that those taxes pay for things that “aren’t really necessary”). Some of them seemed like reasonable people who had done their homework, like the man I spoke with from a group called “FairTax;” (he was nice enough, but I’ll need to read more about it before I comment on the actual plan) but others just wanted to hang their ideology somewhere – and the “taxes” hook was the most convenient place. “Don’t use my tax dollars for abortion,” demanded one sign.
It was a crisp and sunny spring day, perfect weather for a Tea Party. There was plenty of energy and determination. But there was no clear winning argument.
