East Lyme High practices long-arm politics
Teens suspended from school after off-campus party
Administrators at East Lyme High in the East Lyme School District suspended students who were caught partying in a hotel room. The students were suspended from 3 to 10 days for their off-campus activities.
It is not in the student handbook but Superintendent of Schools Jack Reynolds says state statute allows schools to expel or suspend students if their actions off campus significantly affect other students at the school.
“It’s hopefully a message to all kids that really dangerous behavior is something that all of us as responsible adults should be saying it shouldn’t be condoned. It shouldn’t be winked at,” says Reynolds.
Just how does an off-campus party significantly affect other students at the school?
Additional contact: Principal Lawrence Roberts
(Tip credit to Tori in Texas)
Time for a lawsuit. It will be up to the school to defend their position.
At least they were only suspended and not expelled. I don’t agree that the school should get involved with things that happen outside of school and school functions. The issue should be between the parents, the police, and the court system. The school should not be parenting our kids 24-7. Teenagers are going to mess up. Taking away education which we preach to them is so very important does not make sense to me. Suspension may not bother some kids in the least. All it does it create more hostility between students and the school system.
Deb
This is a fairly wealthy area. I can’t imagine parents of these kids going along with this. I would imagine they would bring a lawsuit. The school rule seems overly broad. I believe it would be up to the school to justify how suspending these kids protects the other students.
If it is not an official school activity or happen on school property then the schools should have zero jurisdiction over the kids.
Administrators and politicians are battling to control the flood of people leaving NYC schools. ZT is crazy because it’s often targets people who not native members of the community. It sustains property values, and insures outsiders stay out.
Something like this happened at a local PRIVATE boys prep school several years ago. A student had a drunkfest at his home, during the summer, while his parents were out of town. The police were involved and several students from the school were cited for underage drinking. The school informed the parents of the host that he was not welcome back in September. They sued. The judge dismissed, saying “This is a PRIVATE school, which gives them privileges the public schools lack.”
The amusing part was when the parents said, “They can’t do this, we’ve paid them $X thousands of dollars a year in tuition.” The judge replied “Yes, and other parents paid that tuition, too - they pay that much so their sonss won’t have to go to school with the likes of your son.” The key here is, in the public schools, you don’t get that sort of ability to pick and choose the out of school lifestyles of your child’s classmates.
Dweeb, There is a difference between parents choosing a private school that empower’s their personal ideology and using public funding to empower the ideology of business. If you drop a huge wad of money on something you no longer have an ecosystem. Someone is catapulted into powerful positions based on their skill in fund raising and collaboration. The more money that rolls in the more righteous they feel. It doesn’t matter if kids are dying from the drugs, committing suicide, can’t achieve, or if
teachers loose their jobs. Everyone is powerless and a few lucky people feel they must be doing something right because they temporarily deflected blame. It affects private schools too because the same �methods� that create public failure exodus into the private system which must now follow the same guidelines or loose accreditation.
At my school in CA, which is private, we had a similar situation last year. A few kids were dumb enough to go to a hotel room with a boy from another school, and have a little party with drugs and beer involved. It happened over the weekend, and it happened off of school property, but everyone involved was punished. Three of the boys that went were on the varsity football team, and even though they were some of our best players, the one dumb enough to stay through the whole episode was expelled, and the other two (who left after only a few minutes) were told to sit out three games. Subsequently we lost all three games, and didn’t make it into playoffs in a year we should have.
Do I think they shouldn’t have been punished because it wasn’t specifically at school? No. I’d say the right thing was done, because all of the little junior high boys that were hearing the rumors of what the ‘cool’ kids in high school were doing, got to see some of the consequences of those boy’s actions first hand. It can’t be ignored that when something of that magnitude occurs, every student knows about it in a short amount of time. Obviously this means that out of school behavior affects other students, and if the student perpetrators continue to be seen in the halls, essentially as role models to younger students, they are having a negative effect, and should be removed.
Ellie, if you choose to pay for the privilege of excluding children from education that is your choice. You have no right to do that with public funds. It doesn’t serve the public to have uneducated people, but even worse the criteria of influence is very subjective. As you mentioned yourself the punishments are never fairly distributed, so the *influence* was not even removed. The public has not agreed to using schools as moral authorities who act outside of the law.
When parents are forced to find private options they will flood the private system with kids the public school didn’t want. The private system has a newfound opportunity to make an easy buck based on behavior management and not academia. The ability of a school to provide a controlled enviornment where rules are followed and child discipline guides children to better choices should not be eliminated so easily.
“Dweeb, There is a difference between parents choosing a private school that empower’s their personal ideology”
SWP, if you read more carefully, you’d see that was exactly my point.
The same thing happened at my daughter’s school last year. A girl was attacked by another at our annual festival in Greenfield. She was hurt bad enough to require a trip to the local ER. Even though the festival has nothing to do with the school and it was at 9:00 p.m., she was going to be expelled for the remainder of the year. She did not start the fight and was trying to defend herself. How can a school have jurisdiction over a student when they are not at school, on a field trip and it’s not during school hours? Her mother immediately took her out of school and enrolled her in a different one.
That’s a question for a lawyer to answer. I believe that a school has to prove that a student is a real danger to the rest of the students to suspend or expell him/her (charged with rape, murder, a real “weapons” possession). In this case, it looks as if the girl’s defending herself off school grounds and at a function that had nothing to do with the school didn’t rise to that level. Her mother should have sued.
These public school “educrats” have too much to say about how people live their lives outside of school.
East Lyme has a history of picking and choosing.
If you are part of the “In” crowd its allgood.
Nothings changed
The Middle School and the politics there are worse!
East Lyme Middle School is the place to be if you want to play politics! Too many good teachers and good people leave there because of
mismanagement, mistreatment and not belonging to the rich, immoral and ill - suited for education
world.
DONT WASTE YOUR TIME THERE IF YOUO WANT A VALUABLE EDUCATION OR A PROFESSIONAL WORK ENVIRONMENT!!!