Hometown or homegrown?
Hometown T-Shirt Causes Problems for Gwinnett Student
This one hits close to home. Literally. Grayson High School, the location of this incident, is a dozen miles from my house.
Terrell Jones is a student at Grayson. He and his family are damned Yankees*, just like me and mine. They are transplanted from Hempstead, NY and that is the source of Terrell’s problems.
A student at Grayson High School, in Gwinnett County, was stopped by a school administrator when he was spotted wearing the shirt that read “Hempstead, NY 516), a reference to the Long Island town, and its area code. But, the administrator only saw the first four letters of the town’s name, and believed it to be a drug reference.
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After being questioned by school officials, Terrell finally convinced them to do a search on the internet and see that there really is, in fact, a Hempstead. After determining the existence of the town, the boy was allowed to return to class. The boy’s father is still furious.
I am familiar with the city name Hempstead (England, not NY) but can’t fault the administrator for not knowing it. What I can and do fault him with is making any sort of a deal over a reference that is so obviously a city/state address. Even if the t-shirt had just said “hemp” that does not mean “marijuana”. It means hemp and hemp is a totally legal and innocuous item.
That isn’t the worst thing though. What is even more irritating is the ivory tower condescension. After the administrators are shown to be wrong there was no apology, no admission of fault. Quite the opposite actually.
“It raised a red flag, the administrator checked it out, and that’s what he’s suppose to do,” said Gwinnett schools spokeswoman Sloan Roach.
No reasonable person would have seen that shirt as a ‘red flag’. Unfortunately the school system will never admit that they acted unreasonably and will therefor never learn from their mistakes.
* A ‘Yankee’ is a northerner who’s visiting in the south. A ‘damned Yankee’ is one who stays.
(Tip credit to everybody Bettina, Aaron Young, Oliver Trimble, Jack Mitcham and Brian Leonard)
Does anyone else see the humor in the administrator being named Roach? Should he be interrogated for wearing a nametag?
Oh boy, I can’t believe I didn’t catch that. Now that is ironic!
Someone wrote on another site that basically today’s bureaucratic public school administrators are not intellectually curious or bright and that their minds haven’t expanded past the junior high school level. Remember the teacher who got in trouble for using the word “niggardly” in her classroom? School administrators actually thought it meant something else.
Why didn’t they check out the words “Hempstead, NY” before confronting the kid? It would have saved them some embarrassment — Oh, I forgot, they’re either too stupid to be embarrassed or too arrogant.
Too many dumb people in school administration today. One of these days, we’re going to turn on Jay Leno and he’s going to have a slew of “dumb principal” jokes.
I was reading the paper yesterday, and noticed that in the middle of the front section there was a full page ad for a department store that had a woman in a bikini taking up nearly the entire ad. Someday soon a kid is going to have to take a paper to school for an assignment, the wrong person will see that ad, and the kid will get suspended for bringing inappropriate pictures to school.
We weren’t allowed to talk about a number of things in our government class. Among those things were abortion, illegal activities, and politics.
Would any of y’all like to try teaching government without being able to mention any of those?
Our teacher said to heck with them and decided that if it was in the paper (which the school approved being delivered to our classroom daily), it was fair game.
Still, I wonder if anyone would have objected to this same action if the kid had been wearing a shirt from “Intercourse, PA” or “Climax, MI”? And I won’t get into the conundrum that would be caused by “Middlesex, NJ”.
No word on whether shirts reading “Grayson High” will be allowed, given their blatant drug use reference.
Heh, gotta love this:
(Tip credit to Bettina, Aaron Young, Oliver Trimble, Jack Mitcham and Brian Leonard)
Just what is an offensive t-shirt nowadays? I was at a BBQ place the other day, and they sell a shirt advertising “the leanest butt in town.” I think that’s harmless, but perhaps not school appropriate… but another parent might be fine with that one. School administrators have to waste too much effort on dress code decisions. Our HS handbook had an update this year re bare midriffs. School uniforms look better all the time…even if they may seem to be a zero tolerance solution. A good t-shirt for this particular administrator… “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?”
I go to Grayson High School, or I did, I just got kicked out(Surprising Right?) Well anyways, The first thing you see when you walk in is “First Comes Learning” When in fact it should be “First comes Dressode” They should be more concerned with the kids snorting lines in the bathroom, but they are blinded by the kids with shirts that say their hometown on them.
Quite frankly, the bottom line is that our school systems across this entire nation have become less about education and more about beauracracy and politics.
My twelve year old son began his school year as a new seventh grader at Asheville Middle School in North Carolina in August 2004. Within the first 2 weeks of school, he became the target of “bullying” by a little gang of boys calling themselves “The Pimps”.
These boys were so brazen as to even threaten him in front of ME one afternoon by chasing him all the way to my car door. THIS, with a school Asst. Principal standing just a few feet away, acting as though she “didn’t see a thing”…which would stand to reason when one makes it a practice of looking off into the distance above the students’ heads as opposed to making an effort to observe and maintain order on campus as her job description would require.
My son’s LIFE was threatened by these boys DAILY. They stalked him between classes. One of them even pulled a knife on him and told him he’d “slit his throat”…it goes on and on.
Numerous conferences with the Teachers, Guidance Counselor, Assistant Principals (plural) and finally the main Principal resulted in nothing more than a mixed bag of lame excuses; “We’re trying to get this figured out. We just don’t understand why this is going on. Maybe it’s because your son tends to speak on a more adult level and the other kids just don’t like him.”
The big gut-punch was in the conference with the Main Principal. After I told her the names of these boys…that they were a gang who called themselves “the Pimps” and the numerous threats they had made against my son…she informed me that “there were no gangs on her campus” and that the boys I had named were from “some of her higher tax bracket families”.
WOW!!! And that makes it okay because, WHY???
She then tried to turn the situation around on my son and have HIM accept the responsibility for what was happening to him.
We got absolutely NOWHERE with this school administration and felt that we were treated in a very “dismissive” manner. Long-story, short…on October 22nd, this gang of boys made-good on their threat by “hiring” two other boys (from less fortunate family backgrounds) to attack my son. (We know THIS because the two morons informed my son of who sent them before they attacked him.)
He was pulled, by his ANKLES, from the top of the gym bleachers, hitting the gym floor so hard that he suffered a displaced wrist fracture, multiple abrasions and bruises, and momentarily blacked-out upon impact with the floor.
After his medical treatment was completed and we returned home that evening to care for him, we recieved a call from “the Principal” inquiring as to the extent of his injuries.
The phonecall, although disguised as her brand of concern, felt more like a blatent taunt. I mean, come-on already…please don’t try to convince me that a woman with a Ph.D in Education does not know the definition of the word “FRACTURE”!
I had to tell her THREE TIMES that his wrist was fractured. She then told me to “explain his injury to her, if I could, because “she was not real “up” on her medical terminology”.
(I explained it to her in GREAT detail with no difficulty whatsoever, after having worked in the medical profession for 16 years (now a housewife) and married to a Medical Professional who himself has 15 years of orthopaedic specialization on his resume’.)
I finally ended-up having to put it to her this way, “…and if you need that in layman’s terms, you could say he’s not just broke…he’s broke real good.”
How’s THAT for “Stupid Principal”???
It gets better. The DA’s Office got involved due to a relative who works there realizing that the charges against the two boys had been improperly recorded when they were filed. After their investigation into that issue, they found that the Principal had “pressured” the School Resource Officer into lessening the charges against the boys.
Another long-story, short…she evaded the DA’s office (for weeks) until two hours before they had to make a final decision regarding the charges against the boys—at which time she DENIED the involvement of one of them (even though my son had made PICTURE ID’s of both of them), forcing the DA’s Office to drop the charges on that particular assailant, on HER WORD alone.
Ultimately, after an entire day spent in court, only to have our case continued due to the assailant’s guardians never taking him to see his court appointed attorney…we ended-up dropping the charges against HIM, realizing that it wouldn’t make any difference in the big scheme of things. He’d only have gotten probation (which he’ll be on soon enough in his life) and a curfew (that NOBODY is going to enforce anyway).
After having talked to THREE different local Attorney’s about a case against the school for failure to provide a safe environment in which to learn…I found out that this particular school system falls under the “Sovereign Immunity Statute” protection that our City Government enjoys. i.e.- I’ve been told we don’t have a leg to stand on.
Hence, the Administration’s arrogance and total disregard for what’s happening to the poor kids forced to walk through those school doors on a daily basis…and most of their parents, just like myself a few months ago , do not even realize this law exists; and that there is NO ACCOUNTABILITY for these so-called “Educators”. Their “Code of Conduct” Manuals they send out at the beginning of each school year is a waste of paper.
…and we wonder why there’s so much school violence???????
Georgia schools also have Sovereign Immunity, granted to them by the state constitution. For those who are unfamiliar with the term it boils down to the authority not being culpable for people in their charge. That is, the school is not responsible for your child being injured when he is in their care, no matter how he was injured or how negligent they were.