Posted on 04/22/2006 10:20:53 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
OCEANSIDE – Representatives of a national lawyers association are calling many of Oceanside Unified's 224 protest-related suspensions potentially illegal because they stemmed from students refusing to return to class when directed by school personnel.
James Lafferty, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles chapter, which champions the rights of minorities and seeks to protect civil rights, said the state Education Code makes it illegal to suspend students for truancy. And Kate Yavenditti, a representative for the San Diego branch, agrees that students with complaints of unjust treatment may have a basis for challenging the suspension.
“Really what they're doing is punishing kids for political speech and political actions,” she said.
Oceanside schools Superintendent Ken Noonan said students were not suspended for truancy, but for defiance of authority. They refused to obey the direction of a teacher, administrator or security guard when told not to leave campus or instructed to return to class. He said the students were not truant because they were on school grounds at the time.
Lafferty said no matter what label is being attached to the student action, refusing to go to class is tantamount to truancy. What's at issue is an overreaction to student political expression, he said.
“This is a linguistic game,” Lafferty said. “You can't just change the words and escape the meaning. Any time a kid is truant from school, they're defying authority. They're defying state law. They're defying something far greater than a security guard. But, nevertheless, you can't suspend them for that.”
A top legal counsel for the California Department of Education says there are some gray areas, and these suspensions require a case-by-case evaluation.
Lafferty said the guild has established hotlines in English and Spanish, and hundreds of Los Angeles students have called with complaints of truancy-related suspensions during the student protests of immigration legislation. Many of those students were told they were suspended for insubordination, he said.
His agency will represent them in either a class-action lawsuit or through some other legal means in an effort to erase the suspensions from their records, he said.
Los Angeles Unified School District public relations officials said no students were suspended for truancy, and the school district distributed a memo on March 28 cautioning administrators that students cannot be suspended for that reason.
San Diego Unified suspended roughly 120 students for misconduct associated with the student protests during the week of March 28, district spokesman Steven Baratte said, though none were truancy-related.
In Oceanside, the student protests at several middle and high schools culminated in a March 29 lunchtime face-off with police and students at Oceanside High School. About 200 students converged on a school gate, some trying to get over it or break it.
Three students were arrested for throwing or attempting to throw objects at some of the 80 law enforcement officers called to the quell the disturbance. Officers shot pellets filled with pepper spray at the students' feet. The school went into lockdown, and students were ordered back to class over the intercom and in some cases in person. They were also told not to leave campus.
Of the districtwide suspensions for one to five days, 157 were Oceanside High students.
Oceanside High Principal Kimo Marquardt said, “They were told to report to a certain class or a certain building in a lockdown situation. If they didn't do that, they were defying the direction of a staff member. Nobody is allowed to just get up and leave campus. If they just decide to walk off campus without permission, that is defiance.”
By contrast, students who were merely truant were issued Saturday school, Marquardt said.
Michael Hersher, deputy general counsel for the California Department of Education, said suspension is both an inappropriate and illegal sanction for truancy.
However, if students are not in class but on campus, they're not considered truant and are not free to wander around the halls unsupervised, he said.
“If a kid is face to face with a teacher and the teacher says, 'Get to class,' and the student defies them, that strikes me more as a defiant situation than a truant situation,” he said.
But the issue gets ambiguous if all students are instructed generally schoolwide to go to class and some decide to ditch a couple of periods, whether it's to protest or skip school.
“That's a little more of a tweener,” Hersher said. “A kid could say, 'I wasn't even part of that demonstration. I was just cutting.' I don't know how you distinguish a kid who is trying to defy school authority from kids who decide to cut in the middle of the school day.”
Parent Teresa Hodges, chairwoman of the school site council at Oceanside High, said all three of her teenage children were suspended, and she's still baffled about why they were considered defiant.
“I understand that between all the commotion they were told to go to class, go to the MPR room, go to the field,” she said. “My older son and daughter said they didn't know where they were supposed to go. My son didn't know there was a lockdown. I still don't know why they're being suspended, but we're being told all three were defiant.”
Hodges and her children have filed a complaint with the school.
At other Oceanside schools, many students were suspended for defying authority when they failed to return to class when instructed to by school personnel or when they left campus.
Lafferty said it's worth examining the reasons behind the issuance of large numbers of suspensions by any school district.
In San Diego Unified, some students were disruptive during lunch, Baratte said. Some others were hammering on classroom doors inciting other students to disrupt the school day.
Noonan said at Oceanside High students were yelling and chanting and refusing to go back to class, and were disrupting students who were in classes trying to learn.
“We disciplined them for what they did on campus, not off campus,” Noonan said. “In this case the kids were already in school. They'd been in classes all morning. It's a closed campus. Kids are not allowed to leave campus for lunch. The students actually disobeyed instruction . . . to go back to class when the bell rang.”
Lafferty said suspensions were likely appropriate for some students.
“But in Los Angeles, 90 percent of the kids we've talked to were suspended simply for following other kids who went outside,” he said.
Hersher said this is a murky area.
“You'd have to look to see what the students knew, what they did, what they did or didn't defy, what was in their head basically when they ditched,” he said.
At issue, he said, is how the same student action would be handled on a day where there was not a big political demonstration.
In some places, truants AND their parents can be sent jail.
If you are too young to vote then you shouldn't be participating in political affairs.
***James Lafferty, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles chapter, which champions the rights of minorities and seeks to protect civil rights...***
The NLG is a far-left organization which has aptly been described as "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7494
Those demonstrators deserve to be suspended, and some of them ought probably be expelled. I grew up in CA and Oceanside used to be a rather pleasant beachside community.
If these young ingrates are Illegal, they should be shipped back to Mexico or whatever Third World hole they came from. If you play nice, you lose with these hoodlums in training.
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