Reply to Scandal Poolesville High School Student Arrest

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Folks are so quick to blame MCPS for shuffling around kids that have problems. There’s no other solution. They can’t build more alternative schools to stick the kids who don’t want to “do school” because the schools end up being failing schools which don’t meet the requirements of the public schools to provide a free and fair public education. Kids that used to drop out at 16 can’t since the age of mandatory attendance was raised to 18 around 2015. As a society we have no actual plan to support children 11-17 who need real support to overcome trauma / poverty / learning disabilities and become productive citizens. We just hope that we can use the schools to contain kids until they grow up. Shuffling the trouble makers around used to separate them from other kids and reduce poor behaviors, but now with cells phones and easy transportation, they easily stay in contact with each other.[/quote]

I think you are mostly right but let's clarify that the call isn't for alternative programs for kids who "don't want to do school."

It is for programs to meet the legal requirement to educate kids who have committed crimes, and not to mainstream those kids back into regular high schools so they can rape their classmates four months later.

[/quote]
The context for this thread was kids who commit crimes. Not all kids who don’t want to do school commit crimes, but almost all kids who commit crime aren’t interested in school (based on the grades of HS students that go through our school who get into trouble.)

There used to be schools for kids like this, but they got shut down under No Child Left Behind around 2005-07 timeframe because according to the data, these were failing schools because the kids couldn’t read/do math. It didn’t matter that the educational opportunity was there, the outcomes weren’t acceptable.

[b]Again, as a society we don’t have a good solution for this.[/b] What I think children like this need are special boarding schools in remote areas that address mental and physical health, education, and vocational training. Put them in construction trade training while repairing homes for the elderly in Western Maryland. Have them help with parks services clearing invasive species, building rain gardens, planting trees, cleaning waterways. Get them into pre-apprenticeships learning electrical grid/solar farm/wind farm work. Teach them household skills such as cooking and cleaning while they help to maintain their group home. Pay for enough qualified adults to do this work with these kids. These type of programs are expensive up front, but they save society money down the road in reduced crime, legal system costs and running prisons.[/quote]

Experience shows that MCPS often has the absolute worst solutions to these sorts of problems, though. I don't know why, maybe because a district near the nation's capital draws people always looking for the next thing, but this district is chockablock with half measures that look good on paper for about one year, and then start falling apart in the implementation, but it doesn't matter because the person whose brainchild it was has moved to a new role.

So, the question is this: MCPS is not the only school district in the country dealing with adjudicated youth. What do other districts do? [/quote]

If they would only use RJ correctly, these problems would disappear.[/quote]
 :lol: [/quote]

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