Reply to Clueless kids on bus

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Clueless kids on bus"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So my 3rd grade DD in AAP came home today and said that she had the distinct pleasure (not) of getting yelled at by this much larger 6th grade boy in the AAP program who is a safety patrol on the bus.  [b]He was mad at them because he heard them discussing the differences between AAP and GenEd classes with another 3rd grader.[/b]

She was really upset because the boy wasn't part of the conversation, but interrupted them.  The girl in the GenEd class had been telling them repeatedly that there was no difference between GenEd classes and AAP classes and that she was just as smart as they were, if not smarter.  [b]When they explained that the AAP classes are for the more academically advanced kids, the boy ordered them to stop talking and "bullying" the other girl.    [/b]

My DD is just a 3rd grader, and she'd never had such a discussion with another student before, and she certainly never had been loudly reprimanded by a 6th grade patrol leader before.  Now she is scared of the boy and doesn't want to get on the bus again.  She wanted to know if he was going to report her to school administrators and why she did anything wrong telling the GenEd student that the more advanced kids had been selected for AAP.

Parents of GenEd kids: please stop telling your kids they are "just as smart" as the others. They will parrot this BS back, even if you think they won't, just leading to arguments that aren't very productive.

School counselors: if you happen to be reading this, please sit down with the GenEd classes at your school and make sure these kids know that there is nothing wrong about being in either a GenEd or an AAP class.  [b]And please ask the administration to remind safety patrols that they are there to help maintain order, not take sides on behalf of GenEd students or police what younger children say to one another about how kids are selected for AAP[/b].

FCPS: please don't bend to the pressure to do away with centers or drastically cut back AAP admittance.  You would be doing our communities a disservice by pretending that all the kids have exactly the same academic needs or abilities.   [/quote]

OP here.  So many things to address here, where to start...  First of all, in your entirely unimaginative copy and paste effort, you changed a few key points, bolded above.  In the scenario that [i]actually happened[/i], the two girls weren't having a lovely discussion about "the differences between AAP and Gen Ed classes".  Nice try, but these two girls were telling the third girl that she [i]wasn't smart enough to be in AAP[/i].  Nothing nice about that.  They didn't sweetly "explain that the AAP classes are for the more academically advanced classes".  If you don't categorize that as bullying, then quite frankly, there is something wrong with you.

And yes, safety patrols are there to "help maintain order".  Seeing two kids picking on another and intervening on behalf of the child being bullied [i]is maintaining order[/i].  That's one of the things they're taught to do.  If the kids had been picking on a child for any other reason, the safety patrols would hopefully have intervened in much the same way.  Hopefully it's not your kid being treated this way one of these days.  It would be such a shame if the patrol chose to ignore what was going on, wouldn't it?  And I'm sure you'd march on down to the school to make the case that someone should have done something.   :roll:[/quote]

Again, you weren't there.  Unless, of course, you're just the author of a fiction, in which case you can supply however many additional details you'd like  :roll:  and I apologize for not having bought the Cliff Notes sooner.

I don't think it's "bullying" for AAP kids to tell another kid she isn't "smart enough" to be in AAP.  I wouldn't necessarily agree with it - AAP testing measures only certain abilities at a particular point in time - but I totally reject your rather transparent effort to create and/or massage a narrative simply because you don't like the fact that FCPS has determined that some kids, and not others, are eligible for AAP programs.

[b]And, if an older patrol told a younger student to stop "bullying" another student in this scenario AND I was the parent of that student AND she felt intimidated by the older student as a result, I might very well march down to the school to complain about the older student's (i.e., your son's) behavior.    He can certainly suggest that other kids should be kind to one another, but if he thinks it's his job to boss around younger kids and enforce his own (or, more accurately, your) rules of social interactions, we might have a problem. [/b] [/quote]

You have got to be kidding.  You do know that patrols are almost always 6th graders, sometimes 5th?  And that they are supposed to intervene when they see someone being picked on?  So now it is YOU who sounds like the overprotective helicopter parent, swooping in to protect your snowflake from that big, nasty patrol who was smart enough to pick up on snowflake's nastiness.  If I were the parent of one of those girls, and found out that they had been reported and/or reprimanded for this type of behavior, I would be very ashamed and upset to learn that my DD had actually told another child she "wasn't smart".  What a truly mean thing to say.  I'd be grateful to that patrol for bringing it to my attention and you can bet I'd make sure this kid never spoke that way to anyone again.

It's hysterical how you are the one "massaging this narrative" to spin your own fiction of the "big, mean 6th grade patrol who overstepped his boundaries".  [/quote]

I'm sorry you've become hysterical when someone points out that the OP may be spinning a situation that may or may not have actually occurred for rhetorical purposes.  I mean, it's not like she was actually there.  I don't know why I can't come up with a competing narrative in which an older GenEd boy goes on off a sixth-grade power trip and tries to intimidate younger girls into silence because he happens to sympathize with one of their classmates.  In doing so, I didn't try to bad-mouth all GenEd kids, which can't be said for OP with respect to AAP kids.

By the way, going back to the OP's post, I don't see her claiming that the Mean AAP Girls told the Innocent GenEd Girl she wasn't "smart," but only that they were "smarter" than she was since they got into AAP, and she did not.  Like it or not, FCPS determined there was a basis to differentiate among the three girls, and sticking our collective heads in the sand isn't going to change that.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics