Miss School, Go To Jail

A while back I wrote about what I called the criminalization of youth behavior.  The effort of the legislature to turn the ordinary, dumb things that children do into criminal offenses.  A fight at school becomes an assault charge.  Drawing on your desk with a pen is now a state jail felony graffiti charge.  I suppose with the way the United States locks people up, might as well turn the schools into prisons.  The kids can get used to it.

And what happens when an honors student and world champion horseback rider misses a few too many days?  Why she ends up in court.  From the San Antonio News-Express.

In many ways, Jessamine “Sisy” Brown is a typical high school kid — a student athlete who looked forward to prom and keeps her grades up in the hope of snagging a college scholarship.

But Brown, a world champion horseback rider, has found herself in a quandary. Her success as an athlete has caused her trouble at Steele High School, where her numerous absences for competitions have marked her a truant.

On Thursday, Brown and her mother, Kimberly Howard, will appear in a Guadalupe County courtroom for a pretrial conference.

Now, I was not an athlete in high school, so I never had any excused absences for sporting events.  Stupid me, it would have been a good way to get out of classes.

Jose Galan III, Steele’s truancy officer, said he could not talk about specific cases but that the rules are clear.

Parents have three days to bring in documentation, such as a doctor’s note, or absences will be unexcused, Galan said. When 10 unexcused absences pile up, it’s time for court.

“Parents will try to bring up other factors such as behavior, grades, activities they’re involved in, awards they’ve received, etc. etc. And I tell the parents that I can’t take any of those things into consideration,” Galan said. “It’s truancy and only truancy. That’s all I look at.”

If that last line doesn’t sum up the mentality of official people, I don’t know what does.  There’s no room for any kind of individual thinking.  It’s all or nothing.  You’re truant or you’re not.  It doesn’t matter who you are.

And in theory, that should be a good thing.  By not taking any external factors into account, the school can’t be accused of any favoritism.  It also takes away any independent thought process by people in charge.

I am sure that Mr. Galan knows that Jessamine wasn’t out skipping school and causing trouble.  But it doesn’t matter.  You’re either truant or you’re not.  Once again, why do we put up with this type of thinking from school officials?

Stupidity at School: Now With Nudity

In the seminal US Supreme Court case of Tinker v. Des Moines, the Court stated that “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” However, in our hyper-sensitive, post-Columbine age, common sense is shedded at the schoolhouse gate. Common sense really doesn’t even get near the schoolhouse gate, it probably stops in the weapons and/or drug free zone 1000 feet from the school.

And assuming the report is true, common sense has stopped at the Hays County line. From the Austin American-Statesman.

Hays County Sheriff’s Department officials today repudiated a radio report by Alex Jones about an elementary school girl being strip searched by sheriff’s deputies as untrue.

But Jones, right, says he believes the alleged search of an 8-year-old girl was an unlawful one. His shows are “syndicated by the Genesis Communication Network on over 60 AM and FM radio stations across the United States,” according to his Web site, and are available as podcasts.

I’ve never listened to Alex Jones, but I’ve heard the name before. A quick look at his Wikipedia page shows him as the conspiracy theorist type.

The school district doesn’t seem to deny that some kind of search took place.

In a brief statement today, Julie Jerome, an assistant superintendent with the Hays school district, said, “School staff responded appropriately to the child’s comments by contacting Child Protective Services.”

Sheriff’s department spokesman Lt. Leroy Opiela said a deputy was sent to Buda Elementary School on Tuesday to assist the CPS caseworker.

The caseworker, accompanied by the school nurse, went into a private room in the school where an examination of the child occurred, Opiela said.

Jones reported that deputies performed the strip search.

“That is completely untrue,” Opiela said. “Our deputy was asked to leave the room. He was not present for any type of exam or search.”

Jones’ story prompted calls that caused the Hays County 911 system, as well as the administrative lines at the sheriff’s office and the Hays school district, to overload from complaints, Opiela said.

OK, so caused this mess?

Wade Jefferies, the attorney for the family, said a school staff member saw a dime-sized bruise on the back of the girl’s thigh, and asked where it came from.

The girl said she hurt herself, Jefferies said, but when pressed further the girl said her mother may have done it. Jefferies said she was then asked to pull down her pants for a CPS official, school administrators and possibly a sheriff’s deputy.

A dime sized bruise? You have to be kidding me. I’m pretty sure that when I was a kid I managed to give myself a bruise a week, and they were bigger than a dime. After being pressed, the girl says her mother may have done it? I wonder how many times she was asked, or told that the bruise came from her mother. It’s like the old question, when did you stop beating your wife?

I am not a parent, but I cannot imagine how furious I would be if this were my child. Heck, I can’t imagine how furious I would be if my child was searched by CPS and the school over a dime sized bruise, even if the deputy isn’t there. Heads would roll. Figuratively of course, least any school official read this and think this is a threat of violence.

Is this the America we want? Strip searching kids over a bruise. Until enough people raise a fuss about this type of nonsense and stop buying the “it’s for the children” crap we always here, it’s the America we (sadly) deserve.

Kids Being Kids

Getting caught swearing at Caldwell High School gets you a $200 fine, or so I have been told by several sources I would consider reliable.  I believe you can do eight hours of a community service as an alternative, but I haven’t been able to confirm that.  A quick look at Caldwell ISD’s website wasn’t helpful.

A month or so ago, Houston attorney Murray Newman had a post about this very same topic.  I call it the criminalization of youth behavior.  That’s pretty boring, I need to come up with something better.

School seems to be different than 1998 when I got out of high school.  It was a pre-Columbine age.  We had a student get stabbed my senior year, but that was it.  There were no lockdowns.  We had security guards, but they were criminal justice students from Michigan State or people who (I assume) couldn’t cut it at the police academy.  There was no school district police force.   There was one deputy assigned to the school, but he only had to show up if he was actually needed.

I’ve recently had several juvenile defendants arrested for graffiti on school grounds.  The parents, and the students are amazed to learn that if little Johnny was an adult when he tagged the school, he could be looking at up to two years in a state jail.  In fact, they’re amazed that little Johnny is even facing charges.  “Why doesn’t the school just punish him,” is a fairly common question I’ve heard while doing Juvenile cases.  “Why are we even dealing with this,” is a fairly common question the Burleson County Attorney hears from me every time I get a case that (in my humble opinion) should have been dealt with at the school level.

I don’t quite know when schools decided to stop punishing students themselves and started to let the courts do it.  Sometime after Columbine and before I got out of law school, I assume.  Legislatures all over the country were probably bombarded by Helen Lovejoy types.  The only sensible solution was to create new laws and jack up the penalties on the existing laws.

Was it a success?  If the goal of it all was to turn usual school problems into felonies, well, then mission accomplished.