Should a Student Get Suspended for Poking a Burger? Context Matters

Should a kid get suspended for poking his finger through another kid's cheeseburger at lunch?

It depends.

And that's why I'm so frustrated by this article from the Hetchinger Report, which I talked about in my last video.

And it includes this list of seemingly kind of silly and ridiculous things that kids have been suspended for.

But in that data set, which was requested through FOIA, Freedom of Information Act request, there's just not enough information to know whether this kid who poked his finger through somebody's hamburger was bullying that kid, or whether this was part of a pattern of behavior, or what the context was at all.

See, school administrators are not obligated to defend their discipline decisions to random members of the public, including journalists, including you and me.

School officials are responsible for keeping kids safe and for keeping schools orderly learning environments, and the idea that we can just second guess discipline decisions in situations that we know nothing about, right?

Like it's worse than armchair quarterbacking because we're not even watching the game.

We don't know what this kid has been doing.

We don't know what the educators that work with that kid have been doing to try to improve that behavior.

So the suspension, just looking at the reason for the suspension is absolutely not enough information.

And it is absolutely inappropriate to second guess educators in this way and try to shame them for doing their best to keep kids safe and to keep school on track.

And I think what people don't realize when we try to restrict school administrators from using their professional judgment and from making judgment calls about specific situations, what you get when you try to micromanage administrators like that is you get zero tolerance.

It doesn't sound like you would get zero tolerance, but here's the thing.

When you get really specific about the rule violations and the consequences, and you take away the latitude to exercise professional judgment, you get zero tolerance.

And that's how, like you remember in the late 90s, early 2000s, we had kids getting suspended and expelled for bringing nail clippers to school.

And people said, well, why can't they just use some common sense?

Why can't they just exercise some discretion and say, okay, the nail clippers were not malicious.

For the same reason that school administrators need to be able to look at the stupid cheeseburger incident and say, actually, This was malicious.

This is part of a pattern of bullying.

So I don't know this particular situation.

Nobody does.

There's no way to know more about it.

And here's the thing.

Administrators can't defend themselves.

They cannot reveal the specifics of a discipline situation and say, oh yeah, this kid has been going through all this stuff.

We've given them all these alternative supports and consequences.

We've done everything we can.

They're not allowed to share any of that.

That's all confidential stuff.

So when journalists and activists pull data that they're entitled to under sunshine laws and they try to take it out of context and armchair quarterback it, we go down a road of zero tolerance and we do not want to be down that road.

The road we want to be on is one where we have professionals who are well-trained, who are trained in anti-bias and anti-discrimination and fairness and consistency and policy and state law.

We want people who are well-informed and well-trained, but then after we hire them and train them, we need to trust them.

We need to trust educators to work with our students and we need to stop second guessing them and judging every decision that they make that we know nothing about.

Let me know what you think.