My son called me about 10 mintues ago to inform me that his school is now formally a prison. He said when he arrived there were police surrounding the building and scanning was happening. He said that he turned around knowing full well that he was going to be stopped. The police officer stopped him and said "Hey where do you think you are going?", his reply ummm the college is over there. Glad he is almost 7 feet tall with a full beard that I almost made him shave off over the break.
Yeah that's right my child walked away with my permission and called me with his cell the one he has to hide under a rock before entering the building, the only reason he will be staying at this school is he graduates this year, otherwise I would be all over there in a minute pulling his big giant behind out of there. Enough is enough already. This is a place of EDUCATION, not demoralizing your students and staff. You big asshats.
A request to Pissed Off Mom to contact me directly. I am seriously considering writing a letter to Betsy Gotbaum. I want to ask Ms. Gotbaum to request from the DOE a full disclosure of the random scanning program for the past two years: schools scanned, dates, what was seized, the school's Year-to-Date daily attendance rate on the day of the scanning, and the school's reported attendance rate on the date(s) of the scanning. I would also ask her office to request figures for the cost of this program as measured by the number and cost of the persons involved in site planning, transporting, setting up, operating, and disassembling the equipment, the number and cost of the persons doing the scanning and seizing, logging, bagging, and otherwise managing the seized property, the number and cost of persons involved in outside the building security (to keep students from turning around and going home or hiding their property when they see that scanning is taking place), and the number and cost of persons involved in record keeping associated with this program.
ReplyDeleteI think it's time for the public to get a sense of how much it's costing us for the DOE to seize cell phones and iPods from our kids. I think it's also time for the DOE to be asked formally to measure the deterrent effect, if any, this program has on preventing "weapons" from entering the schools that do not have metal scanners permanently installed. My guess is that this program has zero impact as a deterrent, but it would be easy to measure by scanning several schools more than once in a year and comparing the number of "weapons" seized in those successive visits. This program is paid for out of public funds, and it seems more than a little suspicious that the DOE PR machine in its constant harping of positive data has never peeped on this program.
Steve Koss