On Thursday morning October 11, 2007 seven Madison Police officers and some 30 Lafollette High School staff members were needed to breakup a disturbance at the school around 11:15 a.m.. Officers learned that two adult women and two teenage boys (one of the woman is the mother of one of the boys) came to Lafollette where they confronted another teenage boy in a hallway. The boy, who was confronted, reportedly had gotten into a fight with the other two outside of school earlier in the week. He (the boy confronted) said the group of four circled him and the two adult women encouraged the young men to fight. Staff, hearing the ruckus, responded.
Karen Rivedal has more.
I feel for the administrators and staff at LaFollette. They work so hard to change the climate and culture of their school, but they have no control over the culture outside of the school. And that culture is what allows parents to feel brazen enough to walk into the building and start up an incident that, in turn, effects every kid in the school. How difficult would it have been for these parents to go to the LaFollette administrators, explain their issue with this other student fighting with their kids, request a meeting with the administrators and that other child’s parent, and hash this out like reasonably intelligent human beings? I hope the courts take their kids away from them. They aren’t fit to raise kids if this is how they act.
I agree and I love La Follette High School; however, this issue signifies not just a larger issue of bad parenting, but a problem of generations of a particular people feeling disconnected, on the fringe, let down when it comes to anything related to school. What seems obvious to you or me wasn’t even a choice in their minds unfortunately. Two things have to happen here in my parental opinion: tighter security at La Follette entrances (like the fortress at my kids’ elementary school); and this whole district needs to continually hammer encouraging parents to connect, and made to feel important and relevant regarding their kids’ schools, teachers, principles, etc…right upon kindergarten. Of’course that doesn’t address late comers (hence the tight entrance scrutiny). I’ve had staff who’ve made me feel like I know nothing, like how dare I interfere with their school, their teaching, but the majority have been welcoming and engaging, and it makes a world of difference in a parent’s mind. Of’course it’s always easier said than done. Wasn’t the whole building parent bridges a large component of Mendota Elementary’s success?
The issue of what competent parents and staff could do or could have done is an issue. But, the more accurate observation is that such behavior is never appropriate.
But, I can make hypothesis, with significant confidence, about the characteristics of the parents and kids, and their futures based on this incident.
1) The students involved are at the bottom of their class and they will or have scored at less than basic competence on all WKCE tests.
2) The students reading skills are stuck at the elementary school level.
3) The adults read, if at all, at the elementary grade level.
4) The adults either never graduated from HS or passed through with a D average.
5) The adults earn a minimum wage, if they work at all.
6) The adults have a history of similar disturbances — this is not their first encounter with the police.
7) The students have had prior encounters with the police and this encounter will not be their last.
8) The students will be incarcerated within ten years (within 5 years if they get caught early on).
9) The students will continue to haunt LaFollette and create additional problems.
10) Continued attempts to educate all participants on appropriate behavior and the changes they need to make to give them an even chance at a successful life will be for naught. They will never understand that they can not leave their problems behind by moving to a different place, because their key problems are within themselves.
11) Illicit drugs are readily available to the adults and students.
12) One or both students will have fathered a child before the end of high school.
13) All participants have always lived in poverty. That is their future also.
14) The neighborhoods they live in are filled with threats and violence, which all paricipants have at least witnessed, if not participated in. Yelling is constantly heard within the home and the neighborhood. Arguments are the norm. There is no quiet.
15) All attempts these participants have made to change their conditions (if they’ve really tried) have been met within their homes and neighborhoods with intolerance. There really is no community or family support.
Its too bad that everytime I pick up the paper I must read about parents are bring violence to schools, a shop teacher is hurting a student or police are making a drug bust. Im not sure what must be done to make our schools a safe place for children to learn. I for one am willing to pay more for childrens public education. Spend it on better building security. Spend it on treatment programs for students. Spend it on better teachers,background investigations on staff, counseling etc. Spend it on books or computers. Lets not spend it on Prisons,Jails wars in far away lands. If it means more money for better teachers so be it. I also believe music, arts and SPORTS. These things might help students with life choices later in life. Come on Madison. LETS MAKE MADISON SCHOOLS AS SAFE AS THEY HAVE BEEN IN THE PAST.
Be very careful making such stereotypes. Carrying around and promoting such “hypothesis” are also what keeps kids down who are trying their hardest to succeed. For every problem kid I’ve heard about from Madison schools in the past decade, I can name at least a dozen (from not the most ideal situations by the way) who are unbelievably exceptional. But of’course, we rarely hear, or choose to hear, about those kids.
I stand by my hypotheses. And it’s not a stereotype.
Let’s explain: this as what is called conditional probability and we need to define the terms.
Let P be the probability of some event, let B be the event “Behaves Badly” and let V be the event of living in poverty (which is likely to be highly correlated with each of the other 14 hypotheses).
Then P( B | V ) is the probability that a person will behave badly given that they live in poverty, and P( V | B ) is the probability that the person lives in poverty given that they have behaved badly.
P( B |V ) is not equal to P( V | B ). A stereotype, based on ignorance and prejudice, would equate these two probabilities — like you did.
What is true, of course, is that P( B | V ) is very much less than P( V | B ).
So my hypotheses simply says, given these people have behaved badly (B), then there is a high probability that they are victims of poverty (V) and those things that are correlated with poverty.
The truth, and my experience, is that the probability (likelihood) of behaving badly given a person lives in poverty is very small, but it’s not zero.
I also contend that such probability is higher than if a person lived in more comfortable circumstances, but this is another discussion. This probability is certainly the reason why there are some efforts being made to eliminate economic biases (far more in talk than in implementation), since poverty causes, not necessarily bad behavior, but the other “hypotheses” which I listed.