Posted on 11/21/2008 3:12:30 PM PST by freespirited
Chancellor Michelle Rhee told the DC Council yesterday that the District needs to completely rethink its approach to preventing school violence, with a better trained security force but also by teaching students to manage conflicts before they spiral out of control.
Rhee spoke to the council a day after fights among rival groups at Anacostia High School left five students injured, including three with stab wounds. Flooding school corridors with more police or private security guards is not the answer, she said. Students feel less safe in schools filled with guards, she said, and dollars are better invested in teaching peer mediation and conflict management through anti-violence groups such as Peaceoholics.
"We have to think about a different model for deploying our resources," Rhee said, adding that she and Police Chief Cathy Lanier are discussing possible changes.
A number of violent incidents this fall, including one yesterday, have raised anew concerns about school safety and discipline. Police said a teacher at Spingarn High School in Northeast Washington was assaulted. Police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said that an arrest is expected soon but that she had no other details.
Three teachers at Hart Middle School have been assaulted by students this term. Last week, a teenager at Ballou High School was maced and stabbed. This month, 19 Dunbar High School girls were accused of fighting and arrested, police said.
There was a large police presence outside Anacostia High School yesterday, with some officers standing outside the front doors and others patrolling alleys and forcing those hanging out there to move on. After school, several students were involved in a brief altercation, but it was unclear whether that was related to the stabbing. Rhee said the sensitivity on metal detectors has been heightened to prevent students from bringing more weapons into the school.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Peaceoholism. Why didnt I think of that?
And, of course, we all KNOW it's how people FEEL that matters...
Not how things really ARE.
She must be from the Virginia Tech School of Administrative IDIOCY.
Actually, no. From her Wiki page:
...That same desire for innovation in the schools has been behind the success of the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program—the country’s first federal voucher program. Signed by President Bush in 2004, the program gives around 1,900 students from low-income families up to $7,500 to attend private schools of their choice. The five-year pilot program is up for renewal next year, but Ms. Rhee doesn’t see school choice as a threat to her mission in the public schools. She shakes her head. “I would never, as long as I am in this role, do anything to limit another parent’s ability to make a choice for their child. Ever.” Instead, she sees the competition presented by school choice and charter schools as part of the process of raising standards in the public school system at large. “We have an excellent choice dynamic for parents here... I’m a huge proponent of choice...” People have tried to get her to commit to a ratio of public schools to charter schools. Ms. Rhee won’t play that game. “I don’t enter this with defensiveness, about protecting [D.C. public schools’] share of the market. I believe we should proliferate what’s working and close down what’s not. Period.”
Can't teach the brats reading, writing or arithmetic, how in the hell does she think you will teach them requiring advanced thinking?
I give this brave lady a lot of credit for her efforts to turn around the worst and most costly school system in the world. For the sake of the suffering poor trapped in D.C. schools who hope for a better life for themselves and their children, I for one wish her Godspeed.
A solution here is to have “home workers” who go house to house training the parents (parent, single mother, auntie, granma, etc) in child care and parenting skills (birth to HS graduation).
One major problem is that these kids haven’t had a real Mother Figure who acted as a Mother. And just where IS the Father? Their parents are teenagers, druggies, absent parents. The parenting is done by the GANGS. If the need to be noticed is not given by a parent, the kids can find it in the gangs.
One of the problems of inner city kids is the need to have their parents (both of them) to parent them, to love them, to recognize them, to hug them, to reprimand them, to give them guidance and disciple them.
All that Annenberg Money WASTED when it could have gone to hire “home workers” to help the families who never had examples of a Mom and a Dad to teach them how to be parents.
This lack of parenting skills is universal, not just limited to one ethnic group or income group.
The “Reagan era” parents were the last real Parents . . . the “Baby Boomers” were the Hippies (except for me and a few of my close friends - joke, kids, calm down) and raised their children to be “free” and to question everything and grow up as anarchists (generalization, not totally accurate) and to be Democrats (specifically). In the inner city, many of the parental bonds had been chipped away years before by society . . . the Great Society wasn’t really “great” for them; it didn’t help them where parenting and family were concerned.
It’s not “peer mediation and conflict management through anti-violence groups such as Peaceoholics” that these kids need. They need Parents to act like Parents: to love them, guide them; teach them right from wrong.
Let Annenberg give me the same amount of money they gave Obama for the “Challenge” and I’ll have DC in great shape in 2 to 3 years.
And then I’ll run for POTUS.
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