afadams wrote:
As a teacher of family relations and parenting (mostly jr and sr) I begin my year on teen dating and sex. We spend a great deal of time on the topics of STD's, especially HIV/AIDS. It would be great if parents could discuss this with their children, but they are still very unfamiliar. This is essential that it is discussed in detail at school. A poor decision made by a teenager can affect an entire family later.

afadams wrote:
School lunches are a joke. Many fast foods have kiosks in the school cafeteria. What is healthy about McDonalds?

mhollies wrote:
I really feel that school violence is increasing no matter where the school is located. We live in an affluent area where you think that there would be no violence; however, we have more fights within the school than ever before. The gang mentality is reaching the suburbs as well. Any violent behavior needs to be discouraged before it ever gets started. At our school we have a program with the county prosecutor's office. If a student is caught fighting, he must appear before the judge and then spend his days out of school at the juvenile detention center. It's not a vacation away from school. Also, mom and dad are held accountable and must appear before the judge with their child. When the parents are inconvenienced, the school officials get their attention, and usually the child is not a repeat offender. We have spelled out the consequences and have a good system to back up what we say.

afadams wrote:
Violence is in all schools, but schools are also safe. How a school is run makes the difference. Unfortunately we only hear of the violence in urban schools.

lovettes wrote:
I would like to expound on the question regarding violence in schools. I agree that there is more violence in the urban and inter city schools, but as the larger cities grow and begin to swallow up the small rural communities violence will soon be everywhere. At the present time, I can send my children to school and feel that they are in capable hands. We are lodged between Fort Worth and Wichita Falls, Texas and the later of the two is steadily growing and soon enough the big city problems will be felt in our rural community. The problem is there will be no place to retreat to then.

spy6 wrote:
The subject of school violence is very important to me. My children attended Oceanair Elementary School in Norfolk, Virginia for the first 4 years of their educations, ending with the 95/96 school year. I felt the school was very concerned about the safety and well being of its students, and I only had one problem with their safety in 4 years. One out of control student caused this problem, and although the Norfolk Public School District had ways of dealing with this student, the district frowned on the administration for asking for help. Finally, after expressing my concerns, said problem student was given the help he needed...at a school designed to deal with major problems. This student was an extreme distraction, and all the other students feared bodily harm at his hands. Many children had slipping grades while having to put up with his antics. I even had one of the District Administrators tell me that this child showed the potential to be a good leader. The only thing this child showed me was that he was going to follow his father into prison. And although this may be a sad thing to say, saving him would have been too costly, the cost being the destruction of the safe learning environment of the other students.

The reason the children were not subject to violence was the school's policies on student behavior. The first thing every student learned was to keep his body and belongings to himself. No hitting or swinging of book bags was allowed. Being taught this early kept a lot of untoward things from happening later on.

Also, the students were always under the teachers' supervision when on school grounds. Before school started in the morning, all the children lined up to wait to enter school, and the change of classes was always handled in an orderly manner.

These policies not only made it safer for my children, but also eased my mind, and that of my kids, about the dangers of school.

Then my family and I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and enrolled my kids in Mifflin Elementary School in the Pittsburgh Public School District. From the first minute this was an obvious mistake on our part. The children ran rampant around school grounds before and after school, and during recess, with NO adult supervision. The change of classes were also a pig pile of students running here and there, with no order whatsoever.

If I had been given a chance, I would have voiced my concerns, but the school and/or the district wouldn't allow any parental involvement. They didn't even have parent teacher conferences! How are the parents and teachers supposed to get on the same page, when they are not allowed to communicate? Add to this the shear stupidity of the school administration when dealing with problems, and the situation turns hopeless.

Case in point: My son comes home and tells me that his friend got in trouble for fighting in school. He was fighting off three older students who were trying to stuff him into one of the teacher's lockers. The teacher's lockers are larger than student lockers, and aren't used by any of the teachers. I couldn't believe that the school was so unruly. He also informed me that this was not the first time older students tried locking smaller children in the teacher's lockers, and that one time, a young girl was trapped in there for an entire period before someone noticed her screaming and crying!

So, we have a problem here that is causing distress for the younger students involved, and it is a RECURRING problem. Hmmm -- what to do? Put a lock on the unused teacher's lockers maybe? Wow, that was hard. Problem solved. But the school never came up with an answer; they would just punish all the students involved, INCLUDING the victim.

In addition to these problems, the school was way behind Oceanair academically, and I now feel that I wasted an entire year of my children's education's.

This year I enrolled my kids in Saint Agnes Elementary School in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, where I am allowed and encouraged to talk with the faculty, and I am comfortable with the knowledge that they are free from the dangers allowed in the public school system. I am sure they are now receiving the best education possible.