From Columbus, Georgia comes this story:
Kevin Francois gave up his lunch break to talk to his mother, but it ended up costing him the rest of the school year. Francois, a junior at Spencer High School in Columbus, was suspended for disorderly conduct Wednesday after he was told to give up his cell phone at lunch while talking to his mother who is deployed in Iraq.
According to the Muscogee County School District Board of Education's policy, students are allowed to have cell phones in school, but cannot use them during school hours.Who'd have thought that a bunch of pot-smoking student teachers would grow up to become hide-bound bureaucratic dictators, not willing to allow ANY leeway in their policies? You can put a bear on a bicycle, you can get him to peddle in a circle, but you can't teach him to avoid objects in his path. These public educators seem incapable of any personal judgment or initiative. Had this student told ME he was talking to his mother in Iraq, I'd have told him to give her my best and don't be late for class -- if you can help it. But not these dolts.
"They are really allowed to have those cell phones so that after band or after chorus or after the debate and practices are over they have to coordinate with the parents," said Alfred Parham, assistant principal at Spencer. "They're not supposed to use them for conversating back and forth during school because if they were allowed to do that, they could be text messaging each other for test questions."Perhaps if these adults, from teacher on up, had been able to logically "conversate" with this student, it would not have escalated out of control. But I guess "conversating" is an art these edumacators have not mastered. I've been there. I've been overseas, sitting on a concrete floor in a command center all night, waiting for my three-minute call. Prepared to do anything to hear a familiar voice from home. In tears after hearing my 3-year-old son ordering me to come back. And that was not even in a combat zone. What if this were the last time this boy ever got to hear his mother's voice? What if he never got to "conversate" with her again? Well, at least the bureaucrats at Spencer High School could take comfort in knowing their zero tolerance policies are inviolable.