September – the smell of a freshly waxed floor in your school. This is something that teachers and school administrators are only too familiar with. Along with the clean school, the textbooks piled up on the student desks and the neatly stacked library books always comes some anxiety. When I was a teacher I remember the first-day-of-school nightmares. In my dream was I was not able to control my class. The students were running out the classroom door and I was not able to shout at them to “Come back to the room.” When I became a principal I still had dreams before the opening of school. These were different. I couldn’t get the teachers to supervise their kids. I don’t have those dreams any more but I’m still concerned about supervision of children and keeping them from harm. Read more…
Education Management Consulting Blog
Strip-search of students.
Does requiring a student to remove their clothing to search for pain relief pills go too far? After all, prescription and over-the-counter medicines are used dangerously and can cause death. Should schools be able to search students they suspect of having prescriptive and over-the-counter medications if they know that there is a problem in the school with students selling these medications?
In 2003, Savana Redding was an eighth-grader in a small town of Safford, Arizona near the border of New Mexico. That fall, a boy had gotten violently ill from taking pills at school. When another girl was found with several white pills in a folder, she told Vice Principal Kerry Wilson that she got them from Savana. The pills were prescription-strength ibuprofen and equivalent to two Advil tablets.
Savana said she knew nothing of the pills. Her backpack was searched. When no pills were found, Wilson sent her to the nurse’s office where she was told to remove her outer clothing and to pull out her bra and underwear to check for hidden pills. Nothing was found. Her parents filed a lawsuit against the school. Read more…