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.
This Dog is Gifted
December 18, 2008 by Julia King · Leave a Comment
This Dog is Gifted
When my daughter entered middle school some years ago, she came home one afternoon and told her father and me about the little laminated placard she would wear around her neck throughout her school day. We thought she was confused.
“If you get good grades, you get a bronze card,” she said, “but if you get Cs or worse, you get a white card. And the kids with good grades get to sit in a different part of the cafeteria.”
“Oh, honey,” I assured her, “they wouldn’t do THAT. It would be so… I don’t know, weird.”
Well, they DID wear color-coded placards and it WAS weird. When I complained about it to one of the school counselors, she told a story about a guy without arms or legs who made an incredible life for himself as an inspirational speaker. A bronze-card kinda guy if ever there was one.
My daughter agreed emphatically that the system was wrong, that it demeaned the average (and below-average) achieving kids in some fundamental way, but she clung to her bronze card and her comfy space in the school cafeteria. Those “other” kids were a little wild, she confided. While she sympathized with their plight, she was not exactly ready to sit with them and their exploding ketchup packets. After a while I gave up trying to convince her to take up her uncle’s advice and stage a mass protest, tossing the cards — Vietnam Vet style — over the lunch counter. And after a couple of visits to the cafeteria myself, I secretly loved the seating arrangements. My polite, obedient, skinny little daughter most definitely belonged on the “safe” side of the room partition.
It was classic Kubler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally… acceptance. It’s no big deal. It’s how grown-ups live anyway. Trailer parks for some, and multimillion dollar houses behind gates for others. Teach them when they’re young, right?
Recently, a researcher in Vienna, Austria discovered (or maybe we’ll just say “documented”) jealousy in dogs. Dogs were taught to reach out their paws and when they did, they were given a treat. Then they changed the rules, gave some dogs delicious treats (like sausage) and others slightly boring treats (like bread), until finally they took the treats away entirely from some of the dogs — and gave the other dogs sausages right in front of the snouts of the unrewarded dogs. Eventually, the unrewarded dogs stopped trying. They rolled paper into spit balls and threw them at the researchers. They started skipping class and smoking pot. Okay, they totally would have if they could have.
Probably there is a dog somewhere (without legs or legs) that would not have given up. That dog would be an inspirational barker for other dogs.
Most kids are at least as observant and sensitive as dogs. Finally, after many years of teaching and observing them (kids, that is), the Montgomery County Maryland school system has figured this out. They have decided to stop giving some kids sausages and some kids nothing, meaning they will retire that loveliest of all lovely school terms — “gifted.” They will still offer a range of school work, some less and some more challenging; they just won’t publicly label the children. Not surprisingly, some of the parents whose children were so-labeled are disappointed. These people will no longer be able to toss the term around at dinner parties, which is the best thing about labels.
*Update (Jan. 2009): After the initial article (about Montgomery County Schools dropping the “gifted” label) appeared in The Washington Post, a school official wrote to the paper and said the claim was untrue. Sausages, Anyone?
