The litigiousness of the country certainly discourages the teachers using any type of force.
Anecdote time!
My wife is a teacher, and about ten or fifteen years back she was forced to physically restrain a student because he had just punched another student and was trying to stab a student-teacher with a sharpened pencil. My wife grabbed his wrist and pulled the pencil out of his hand, and spoke sharply at him to stop what he was doing. The kid (a pretty big 13-year-old) collapsed sobbing because he kind of realized what he was doing, and my wife and the student-teacher comforted him until the school admins came.
A day later, we learned that the parents of the kid were trying to get my wife charged with assault, which the police declined to do. None the less, they announced (through a lawyer) that they were suing the school, the school district, and my wife specifically, with… all sorts of stuff. Intention to inflict bodily harm, negligence, and a bunch of other things that I can’t even remember now. I think they were looking for $450,000 from us, specifically.
It was a pretty harrowing few days for us as we looked at our meager savings and at the hourly cost of lawyers and talked to various people about options.
However, that’s when the Teachers’ Union stepped in, and incidentally why am solidly pro-union today and hate Scott Walker with a passion usually reserved for things like Ebola and ringworm. Their legal guys swooped in and met with us, telling us not to worry, we wouldn’t be paying a dime to anyone, don’t talk to anyone without them in the room, and to sit back and relax.
I’ve only heard third-hand rumors of what they did, but apparently they pretty heavily implied that if the suit moved forward their kid would be formally charged with whatever the juvenile equivalent of attempted murder was (the police hadn’t charged the kid either), and that there were some irregularities in the family’s tax status that might come to light if the suit moved forward. The whole legal case simply went away a day or two, and the family moved out of the county two weeks later.
God-damn son.
I think I’ve figured out where Jimmy Hoffa ended up.
You mean somewhere besides alive in a bunker in DC, running the deep state?
Forget the Teamsters, the Mafia or the Yakuza, if I’m ever in a jam I want the Teacher’s Union to settle it for me!
In defense of the schools guns weren’t a huge problem 20 years ago on campuses either. There have been kids arrested for threatening to shoot up the schools and violent crimes. There are Facebook threats and anti-social behavior.
Knowing a kid can shoot up a school changes things from a meeting in the principal’s office to a meeting at the local police department.
Sign of the times.
Sadly, this is not really true. Time is flying but… it’s been almost 20 years since Columbine, and these issues didn’t start with Columbine.
Columbine was not the first shooting in this line of shooting we keep track of now, and I was in High School during the Springfield shooting. That was Oregon. For Junior High, we had drug sniffing dogs, police that came now and then to check lockers for drugs, thus the dogs, and we had least one kid taken because brought a gun to school. The teachers just didn’t call them for every conflict. The high school I would have gone to had we not moved had metal detectors, that’s for weapons, and all the schools had dress codes to discourage gang activity, mainly the Bloods and Crips… Plus the campus was closed because of too many fights at the nearby fast food restaurants… and that wasn’t even an inner city school.
I know these are serious issues but it’s hard to believe that having that many kids with records and in handcuffs is a good answer, and, well I trust teachers more than I trust the police these days.
Wow. That’s some experience. I understand why teachers don’t get as involved as they used to. Heck, I think my sister in NJ was telling me about a snicker bar incident she either read about or happened near her where some parent tried to blame on the teacher for a kid bringing it into the class (they’re not supposed to have peanuts anymore). I just… setting kids up for a record. Heck even in the book with Anne of Green Gables where she slams a chalkboard, in todays’ world she might wind up with a record and could be unemployable for life. And no, juvenile records are not always just wiped clean, and when they can be sealed, they kid actually has to know to go… do it, there’s effort there.
Wow, Columbine has been nearly 20 years? I feel really old now.
But I think you would agree that the fear of another Columbine is what drives the schools now. It doesn’t seem to drive the NRA or the GOP though.
Yeah, but the problem is… it’s been a problem before that in certain area of the country for a long time, longer than twenty years, before Columbine, before Springfield, and no one cared. It is certainly not good that more kid and more teachers are scared now. That was not the answer anyone wanted.
I am thankful, despite my brief experience with stuff like that in junior high and later going to a high school where they seemed to have no awareness at all why I would not buy or wear Nike shoes, that I didn’t get up every morning afraid someone might shoot up the classroom. But even then, there were kids out there who experienced that risk.
Back in my time knives were the thing. The High School I went to had stabbings every year. One girl stabbed another because she wouldn’t share her pickles.
I started carrying a knife to school in my freshman year for self protection. Thankfully I never had to use it.
Well, they were scared of different stuff though – in-school violence vs. massive, indiscriminate murder.
But I’d push back on the idea that no one cared. There were always crimes and violence being committed in high schools, and I think it pretty much crested in the 1980s when I was in high school. There were lots of news items about a stabbing or shooting at X or Y school, and lots of breathless stories about how it had gotten so bad at this or that school that metal detectors were being installed or random pat-downs of the boys were being done to prevent gang violence from spilling into the schools.
I can very vividly recall the debate about installing metal detectors and deploying drug-sniffing dogs to my upper-middle class suburban school because of sharp uptick in heroin sales inside the school.
When was the last time you saw anything reported from the inner city schools, the urban school on the national news level for weeks… the 80s?
You were specifying that in the past (before Columbine) no one cared about in-school violence, which I disagreed with.
If you’re moving the discussion to the present, narrowing it down to inner-city schools and also specifying that an event has to be national news for several news cycles… then no, I cannot think of any instance.
He’s invoking emergency powers to cancel the civilian federal worker pay raises. Literally millions of people.
Edit: FTA:
Top 20 largest federal executive branch employment by location:
| State | Number of federal workers |
|---|---|
| California | 152,466 |
| Virginia | 144,295 |
| District of Columbia | 141,367 |
| Texas | 132,952 |
| Maryland | 120,705 |
| Florida | 89,504 |
| Georgia | 71,739 |
| Pennsylvania | 62,366 |
| New York | 60,727 |
| Washington | 53,211 |
| Ohio | 49,450 |
| Illinois | 44,760 |
| North Carolina | 42,772 |
| Arizona | 38,087 |
| Oklahoma | 37,486 |
| Alabama | 37,386 |
| Colorado | 36,848 |
| Missouri | 33,377 |
| Michigan | 27,405 |
| Utah | 26,109 |
Well Columbine was 1999, you’re talking about 80s, so are you saying you did see national news covering them in say the 90s?
I’m not moving the discussion intentionally. I am talking about time period where I existed. I can’t talk about the time period before I was born. School shootings, like Columbine, have existed and have been reported on in almost the same way my entire adult life. 24 hour news has been there my entire adult life too, but I don’t see the same coverage for the non-white suburbia violence.
Yet was can afford a multibillion dollar military parade for your ego…disgust
So there are hundreds of thousands who will now vote their pocket book against the GOP and Trump. How many of those states are Red states with close races?
Given that these people have been voting against their self-interest for years, I doubt it’ll make that much difference really. Maybe some of them will finally see it but I don’t think it changes many votes.
Actually in my experience most federal employees are likely to vote democrat to start with. So this may just push those that don’t.