Teen Suspended from School for Saying ‘Bless You’

Source: Teen Suspended from School for Saying ‘Bless You’

I was involved in my local school district as my own kids were progressing through the system and you get an insight of the power of local school principles and district boards over our children’s lives when attending school. While the religious right relishes in the traditional concept of schools being locally run to reflect specific community mores, morality, and cultural preferences of the area, school districts across the land still have to meet certain federal and state mandates in order to assure some educational continuity across the nation. Otherwise regions would just mandate their own social and religious bias’s into the curriculum in order to promote their own social agendas that many times don’t meet the definition of a true education. In spite of governmental mandates, many times just the existing educational process still allows for seemingly crazy local interventions of social preference in certain demographic areas. That’s why we see cases like this “Bless you”, young children being sent home because they made their finger into a “gun” as a result of “no tolerance” policies, a plastic knife ending up in their lunch buckets from mom somehow requiring the notification of local police… it’s all nuts and ridiculous.

School administrators invariably will always point to the fear of school shootings and the adoption of so-called “no tolerance” rules out of a total fear of the unknown potential for school violence. This also allows for school boards to interject rules based on personal bias’s and even religious preference. Especially this political correctness crap sweeping the nation. But the real eye-opening realization for me regarding school boards is they have ABSOLUTE control of children’s lives inside those school buildings. There is no Constitution inside a school in the strict sense. Think of the school as a ship at sea and the captain needing total and absolute control in order to assure the ship and its crew return safely to port. Events in the last decades regarding school violence has shifted schools from being education-only oriented to more an education-safety oriented. Now we see seemingly whacked rules that many times appear to be personal agendas of political correctness and all common sense has been thrown out the window, as you see with this “Bless you” event.

Back in the 1960’s, especially in the high school years of the late 60’s for me, our generation was constantly at battle with archaic school administrators who seemingly held on to Victorian authority from the “good old days”. We fought for freedom of speech in our school publications, we fought against random (or not) searches of our lockers for pot and other contraband without some “warrant”, and we fought for concepts we called “student rights”. But at the end of the day when the dust settled the was no “Constitution”; the final authority was ALWAYS the principle backed by the school board. And there was a very logical reason for all this… to assure that the environment for all students (who were legal minors.. not adults) were safe and conducive to a fair and equal education.

The only way to control school boards is for parents to get involved in the system and in attending board meetings.. and not just the PTA, PTO, or whatever they call it these days. Sorry this is damn long.. and I know the reason you made your post was for some political thing.. but I just wanted to take the time and show that there is a story behind the story.. and it’s not about a single maverick teacher asserting her politics in the classroom.