Posted on 04/18/2015 4:48:51 AM PDT by NewHampshireDuo
MANCHESTER — The father of a Hallsville School fourth-grader wants the principal reprimanded, or fired, for allowing an anti-bullying exercise that asked students to curse in class.
Keith Katsikis said he and his wife have pulled their three Hallsville students out of the school after they found out about the exercise he believes is inappropriate for children.
Katsikas has started a petition calling for the firing of Hallsville principal Christi Michaud.
He also sent copies of his letter to the school superintendent, school board members, the mayor, aldermen and the woman who presented the exercise.
“I wanted to make sure everybody saw it,” he said.
School district officials said they are investigating.
Katsikas said he found out about the exercise when he and his wife picked their children up from school Wednesday, as they do every day, and his son told them: “Something really weird happened.”
Katsikas said his son told him that a woman entered the classroom to teach a lesson on bullying. She taped a life-size paper man on the wall and passed out small pieces of paper for students to write vulgarities like several four-letter words and derogatory terms towards certain groups. The word or phrase had to be something that someone has said to them in the past. She collected the papers and mixed them up in a basket and then had children read the word or phrase, so the class could hear them.
Katsikas said the words were vulgarities and his son recalled Evans saying: “Say it like you mean it.” Katsikas said many children protested reading the words, so she allowed them to pick a different word, but they had to participate. She also had them rip a piece off the figure.
When all the children had finished, and only the head of the figure remained, the children had to tape their piece of the figure back in place and apologize.
Katsikas’ son told him Evans said the moral was: “When you swear at someone, that person can never be put back together again.”
Katsikas said his wife went online and found an exercise on the Education World website, addressing the issue of a new classmate trying to fit in that calls for children to say something “mean” before tearing off a piece of the figure. After the children apologize and tape the pieces back in place, the website says: “But it doesn’t look the same and the message is that ‘scars remain ... chances are they will never go away.’”
Katsikas said: “Even if the lesson was given as described in this plan, it is awful.”
After hearing what had happened in his son’s class, Katsikas said he entered the school and wanted to speak with Michaud. She was busy, so he spoke with assistant principal Patricia Auger and when he explained what had happened, he said: “She was physically sickened.”
Katsikas and his wife have been invited to meet Monday morning with School Superintendent Debra Livingston, Michaud and other parties involved, as well as Ward 7 school board member Ross Terrio.
Katsikas said he wants to make sure principals “are mandated to send home notices when something like this happens.”
Since he’s planning on home schooling his children, he said he’s pursuing the parental notification issue for the benefit of the children who remain in the public schools. His philosophy is: “Let them live and learn at a child’s pace.” Katsikis said his opinion is that the Manchester schools are: “A little too risky for my children.”
Katsikas Katsikas Katsikas
Note that all the school personnel mentioned are women. This is what happens when the sole emphasis of education is feelings, rather than knowledge. We see the results on segments of “Water’s World,” where the most expensive cost per student education on the planet turns out imbeciles who think they are geniuses. No caring parent will subject their children to this bullying by women educrats.
I’m a male high school teacher. I’m a conservative and a veteran with over twenty years service in the military. I’m no bleeding heart or shrinking violet and I deplore the left wing’s genuine influence on so much of education.
But this activity doesn’t strike me as having anything major wrong with it. It’s a very standard anti-bullying exercise and it’s one that I’ve seen work.
Kids have a right to not be bullied at school, and for schools to do something to try and stop it happening.
I do agree that parents should be informed about such exercises in advance - that’s a different matter. Parents have every right to know what is going on in their kids classroom, and in most cases to exempt their kid from it if they choose to. But this activity doesn’t seem like a problem to me - and I’ve seen a lot of things that I do regard as big problems in schools.
:: After the children apologize and tape the pieces back in place, the website says: “But it doesn’t look the same and the message is that ‘scars remain ... chances are they will never go away ::
Yet, the unborn are “torn asunder” every hour with no attempt to piece them back together, let alone an apology for the rendering.
The educational union-society approves of such behavior.
Equivalence?
Merely coincidental [/s]
Thank you for your service both in the military and in the school system. I do not agree that this is a positive exercise.
#1 The scars from bullying part is anathema. Human beings grow throughout their lives and change in response to stress, experiences etc. Being challenged often spurs children(and adults) to grow in understanding of themselves, of others, and to develop their ability to withstand stress and to use the experience to excel. Promoting that growth is the parent’s and teacher’s job and opportunity. The emphasis should be on developing self reliance, finding a way to work through situations not a pity party that makes a the target a damaged victim, that tries to shame unshameable bullies who obviously have deeper problems. The message to the class is deeply flawed and damaging to the children.
#2 This is a story about 4th grade children and desensitizing them to curse words and making them participate in mock aggression is wrong in so many ways that it is abuse. The exercise may have been typical yes, even standard, unfortunately, but was very wrong. Thinking through the situation makes it obvious that teachers are going to seminars and being wowed by the presenters and they are not filtering what they are told through their common sense meters. I would have been up in the schools faces for bullying my child and for sending the wrong messages about how to live and grow through adversity.
Anti-bullying is taught by discipline and consequences.
Neither of which are permitted in school these days.
I am confident you can direct all us “non-educators” to where in the Constitution we can find “Kids have a RIGHT to not be bullied”.
No argument that no kid should be bullied, but sometimes a kid has to stand up themselves to the bully to stop it.
I am also 100% for treating bullying the same as any other assault, charge the perpetrator, separate them from the kids. A big part of bullying is that public schools are so focused on the gubmit money for daily head-count that they let anything go on in school. Kick out the bully? Hell no, the school wants the head-count money.
Regrettably, public school has become, at best, worthless to many kids and “educators” are seen with same skepticism as are used car dealers. Who’s fault is that?
There are nuances that can take things from reasonable to outrageous...
...but this seems pretty innocuous while getting a reasonable point across.
..at least by itself.
I think the bigger question is WHY IS THAT KID IN A GOVERNMENT SCHOOL TO BEGIN WITH?
The parent should be punished, not the school. Once put that kid on that big yellow bus, the school OWNS HIM.
But to answer the question - obviously a nice house in a nice neighborhood (or a boat, or a truck) was a HIGHER PRIORITY than protecting the kid, at least in this case.
That is rather missing the point of why this is presented in the way it is.
Today's children are often presented with a system of discipline in schools that is based around principles of restitution or 'restorative justice'. Whether that is a good idea or not, is largely irrelevant, it's the way it is and schools and teachers are forced to work within that type of framework. Especially seeing that large numbers of parents use exactly the same approach in their homes.
One of the big issues about that type of framework is that children should apologise to others when they have harmed them. And this leads to an idea developing that "If I say I'm sorry, it doesn't matter what I did" being very common among today's children. This type of activity is intended to make it clear that just saying sorry doesn't change what you did. It doesn't magically fix it. Any damage done may still be there.
The idea of this approach is not to tell children that they cannot recover from harm. That's completely misunderstanding the point. It's to explain to them that they can't just pretend that they what they do didn't harm others, just because they are sorry.
You seem to be under the impression this is aimed at the targets of bullying. It's not - it's aimed at the perpetrators. And, yes, with some bullies it won't work, because the reasons they do it are not that simple - but it does deal effectively with a lot of milder bullying.
This is a story about 4th grade children and desensitizing them to curse words and making them participate in mock aggression is wrong in so many ways that it is abuse.
Again, it's not about desensitising them. It's the exact opposite sensitising them to the words. In a culture that is constantly surrounding them with swearing and cursing, large numbers of kids do not have a clue that these words should not be used, or why they shouldn't be used. They hear these words all the time on television and in films.
These kids were told to write down words and insults they already knew. Things they hear in their daily lives. That's how it works. Because they are all around them, they don't see the problem with them. This has to be explained to them. They have to be taught why. And unfortunately, a lot of parents aren't doing it.
“I’m a conservative and a veteran with over twenty years service in the military.”
Maybe it’s something in your water then. Here in the states, conservatives have a BIG PROBLEM with who’s exactly running this “anti-bullying” campaign. We’d rather they stay in the bathhouses, versus our schools.
It isn't. Not all rights are written down explicitly in a document like the Constitution. They weren't writing a set of school rules. They were working out how to govern a country.
No argument that no kid should be bullied, but sometimes a kid has to stand up themselves to the bully to stop it.
Yes, they do. And when I'm teaching about bullying, I also teach kids quite explicitly that if it does happen to them, they have the right to defend themselves. The type of approach being outlined in this story isn't the only approach to bullying and shouldn't be the only approach to bullying. But the fact that it's only part of a solution doesn't make it a bad idea.
I agree with most of your other comments as well. But there's nothing incompatible with those and this either.
One day[I know that it will never happen here, because I have been told so many times that it won't] they will go to bed one night, and in the morning wake up to the news that the Government has stripped them of their Citizenship. That they are no longer under the protection of the Government. That they are fair game to all those who wish to harm and kill them. This is the finished product of the anti bullying process. I do understand that I am full of crap, that it will never happen here. So that response does not have to be made.
Do you think there's something homosexual about believing kids should be protected from harm and told it's a bad idea to do things that might hurt other people simply for your own gratification?
Personally I think the problems caused by the homosexual agenda are more or less the exact opposite - the ones who think that kids don't need to be protected and who don't seem to want the risk of damage to kids to be pointed out. Who want to pretend that what they might want to do to kids is actually harmless.
I've no time for those who want any type of sexual or political agenda pushed in schools. But telling kids that you can't undo or wish away damage to other kids simply because you decide it wasn't a big deal - to me, that's a big part of what we should be doing to oppose that type of agenda.
Do you really think that the ONLY WAY to protect kids from being bullied is to have a bunch gays run the program? I don’t.
Well said.
What a @#$% idiot! @@##’n @$$hol#!
No, but I haven’t seen any evidence at all that gays have anything to do with this program. And people I’ve actually seen running this type of program certainly weren’t.
Maybe not there...but certainly here.
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