Category: Blog

Should Teachers Be Armed

Just to be clear:

No one is proposing that we forcibly arm all teaches.

You can be agasint having any teaches carry a gun. That’s a fine opinion to have, but let’s agree on the actual proposal. The proposal is: If a teacher WANTS to carry a concealed weapon, they would be allowed to.

The debate is begin framed as if the government is going to FORCE every teacher to carry a gun.

This is Paul Farhi form the Washington Post:

“Let’s do some math: There are about 100,000 public schools in the U.S. and 3.2 million teachers. If you armed all 3.2 million teachers in all those schools, how many accidents would occur? How many deaths and injuries would result from those accidents?…
So, your math question, class: Would the introduction of 3.2 million guns into schools *prevent* more death and injury, or would it introduce a potentionally deadly and injurious new element into them?”

Paul, no one is proposing what you’re arguing against.

Again, you can be against having any teachers carry a gun in school, but don’t make stuff up to be agasint.

I was with some law enforcement friends the other day. One of them was eating Chipotle and another guy said, “You know they have a law enforcement disount.” He responded, “Ya, but you have a show of force.”

I asked what that means.

“You have to be in uniform and guns showing to get the discount.”

Meaning, the discount isn’t so much to “support our first responders”. It’s to get more police officers in the restaurant.

Free security.

It’s good for business to have police officers wandering in and out all the time.

It’s a deterrent.

That’s all this woudl be with maybe a few teachers choosing to carry guns. Someone wrote on my Facebook page that thier daughter’s teacher is a Marine. Why should he not be allowed to carry if he wants?

 

 

Restorative Justice Part 2


 SUBSCRIBE TO THE iTUNES PODCAST HERE

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I have pretty much zero concern that my kids will ever be involved in a school shooting.

Every year there are about fifty school shootings (and some of those are just shootings that take place near a school) There are 100,000 public schools in America. There are 25,000 high schools in America, so that’s .2% of all high schools will have a school shooting.

We could break that down even more, but you get the idea. I am not worried about my kids ever being killed, injured or even witnessing a school shooting. I know that’s what all of the parents of Parkland, Florida and other schools say, I totally get it.

But let me tell you about what I am concerned about,

I am concerned with my kids going to a school full of daily violence and constant lawlessness, chaos and disrespect.

We focus on the school shootings because they’re shocking and acute and severe. But the constant chaos in our schools everywhere and every day doesn’t make headlines. Madison, Wisconsin: police were called to three high schools in the same district on the same day, in the same hour. School police officers needed to call for backup at three schools within 24 minutes of each other!

A parent wrote to the principal of one of those schools about how it’s just chaos everyday. Why don’t they do something!

And it’s because of Restorative Justice.We’ve talked about this in the previous posts, but the premise is: because more minority kids were getting disciplined than white kids in high schools, there’s a disparate impact. So now no one gets disciplined anymore and it’s game on in the classrooms. Kids know they can get away with anything and they continue to push the limits, knowing they’re untouchable.

So this one parent says “the district is bending over to not ‘offend’ the offenders.”
He talked about how it started off as a few violent kids, but it’s just growing every day because they all know they won’t get in trouble. It’s just Lord Of The Flies, and the kids who do want to learn, they’re at the mercy of the tyranny of the few who are violent and disruptive. Not only that, but the trouble-makers are coddled and protected because they’re so violent and disruptive. It’s completely backward.

We had a teacher call in to my radio show, and talked about how this Restorative Justice in her school has affected her and how she can’t discipline any misbehaving kids. The principal told her that if this kid acts up again, remove all of the other kids from the classroom. Do you see how insane that is? If my kid was in that classroom and he was penalized for some other kid’s misbehavior, I’d be furious. And they do this because they know that the teachers won’t ever discipline them. So it’s just game on and everyone’s penalized because of it.

These kids clearly have no discipline at home, or any family at home, and there’s no middle ground (as the president said last week in his speech) between school and prison. And no school is willing to expel, suspend or discipline in any way, everyone and all the other kids are victimized and punished because of it.

So I’m way more concerned about this than a school shooting.

If I may, this is why I get frustrated, it’s just my personality, it’s just my way of looking at problems, but I get frustrated when people propose things that are on the surface. I hate that we have to talk about metal detectors and armed security guards at every school. I don’t want my kids going to a prison everyday!

I get it. It would stop school shootings, but what the heck is wrong with us that this is even necessary!
We got to get to the root issues here so we don’t need metal detectors or armed teachers. We do these things in the meantime, I’m not against them per se, I just hate that it’s necessary.
It’s because of the breakdown of the family, No discipline. No Dads properly directing boys into men. And here we are. It’s pretty awful.

Not just the school shootings, but everyday in our schools.

I’d love hear your experience. Parents, teachers, please share in the comments your examples of breakdown of values and expectations and the chaos that you experience everyday. Everyone needs to hear the truth. We need to know what you’ve experienced.

Restorative Justice Part 1

SUBSCRIBE TO THE iTUNES PODCAST HERE

We talk on my radio show often about Restorative Justice. This is the progressive “discipline” philosophy in public schools that says, “Suspension rates are too high and minority kids are disciplined disproportionately from white kids. So instead of disciplining kids, it’s game on! And instead of suspending kids, we’re going to let them do whatever they want.”

If you’re a teacher, please share your story in the comments with this Restorative Justice philosophy and how it’s made your job miserable.

We had one teacher call into the radio show and say she has such trouble with one elementary school kid, the principal told her that if he acted up she had to remove ALL THE OTHER KIDS from the classroom.

Check out this article about teachers in St. Paul. One of the teachers says “we have a segment of kids who consider themselves untouchable.” Another teacher, “students who tired of lectures simply stand up and leave…They can just bust into rooms where they don’t belong, just picking fights not even in hallways, in other classrooms, teachers have to lock the door to keep other kids out.”

A fourth-grade teacher, “I’ve been punched, kicked and spit on” and called “every cuss word you could possibly think of,”

One teacher, “Many of us . . . often go home in tears, Please, don’t give us more staff development on racism or . . . how to de-escalate a student altercation. . . . We teachers feel as if we are drowning.”

So the idea is, we keep disciplining kids and they get on the wrong track and go to prison. And we have the “school-to-prison pipeline”, so if we don’t discipline kids at all, then they won’t go to prison.

One teacher says “this is backwards! By not disciplining, we’re telling these kids you don’t have to be on time for anything, we’re just going to talk to you about what you’ve done. You can literally assault somebody, an adult and we’re going to let you come back to the classroom.”

That type of behavior – if you allow that – is just going to get worse. And they’ll eventually go to prison.

The Fresno School District, at least 70 of 85 teachers have signed the petition asking for a stricter and more consistent student discipline policy.

“Students are returned to class without consequence after assaulting teachers, both verbally and physically,” the petition states. “When students face no accountability measures, it undermines the authority of all teachers, and creates a negative campus culture.”

One teacher of eleven years says “a student can say ‘F—-you’ and we’re told that it’s just his personality. The students do the same things over and over again, and we respond in the same way over and over again.”

A school in Ohio, “Teachers in this Ohio town have been physically assaulted 36 times this school year” It’s game on. The kids know it.

Now, what does this have to do with the school shooting in Florida?

This is the Executive Director of Student Support Initiatives for Broward County Public Schools, in August 2017, “we’re not compromising school safety. We’re really saving the lives of kids.”

She’s referring to what’s called to what was called the “Broward County Solution.” It’s Restorative Justice. Broward County used to lead the state of Florida in sending kids to juvenile detention. The progressive solution was Restorative Justice: decrease the number of arrests by not making arrests.
They took twelve different misdemeanor offenses and instead treated them as school-related issues, not criminal ones. In 2011, there were over 1,000 arrests (which is an insanely high number). Four years later, less than 400.
Now, this doesn’t mean the criminal behavior stopped. It’s just fewer kids were getting arrested for the bad behavior.There very well could be, probably was, MORE bad behavior. Just no one is getting in trouble for it.
This school shooter was one of these kids who was always in trouble, but nothing was done to stop him.
Not only that, but in 2012, Barack Obama sent a memo to public schools all across the country telling them to avoid, “methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.” Disparate use means more minority kids are getting disciplined than white kids, so stop disciplining minority kids.

Nikolas de Jesus Cruz is a statistical Hispanic.

When the effort from the school is to lower the suspension rates for minorities and to get them more in line with White and Asian students, officials at the school have every reason to NOT report Nicolas Cruz’s troubling and likely criminal behavior to police.

Miami Herald wrote a great article about his behavior problems and the headline read
Parkland shooter always in trouble, never expelled. Could school system have done more?” The answer is yes.

The opening paragraph talks about how Cruz was a school administrator’s nightmare: kicking doors, cursing at teachers, fighting with classmates. He brought a backpack with bullets to school. One teacher said he wasn’t even allowed in the school with a backpack because they were afraid of what might be in it!

Everyone knew about Cruz, it was not a mystery.

One teacher sometimes had to call security to let Cruz into the classroom and to keep an eye on him during class. A security guard!

Cruz was in the Exceptional Student Program at Broward Schools. Don’t go thinking that exceptional means exceptionally GOOD. In progressive world everything is backward. It’s the opposite. If you’re in the “exceptional program” it means you’re exceptionally bad. An administrator who was with the Exceptional Student Program for 42 years says she’s never seen the document about Cruz’s behavior with such obvious signs that the student would become violent.
The school knew this would happen! Why didn’t they do anything?

Restorative Justice.

To be clear: I don’t expect schools to do all the disciplining. Kids used to be disciplined at home and the school was a supplement. And the discipline and punishment be worse when you get back home. But when the disciplining stopped at home, the school was left to fend for themselves, and after all of these decades, they’ve finally decided to give up. What’s so frustrating and deceitful however, is they’ve given up in the name of helping kids.

So now we live in this world where kids don’t get disciplined for anything. They run the show. They’re in control of the parents. And they think they can be in charge of the teachers too. The progressive mentality is to institutionalize this. And we tell these troubled kids: “Ya. You are in charge.”
This philosophy won’t help those on the fringes. It will allow them to spiral further out of control and into deeper isolation. And the kids who just want to learn while in school are victimized even more.
Restorative Justice has to stop. Make sure your kid’s school doesn’t follow this philosophy.