Students who engage in serious misconduct, or repeated disruptive conduct will be “counseled out.” But private schools are generally small, closed communities, which creates a high level of trust and allows routine misunderstandings and disputes to be resolved reasonably. Also, there are strong disincentives to “going nuclear” for both the school and the parents. The schools obviously stand to lose revenue, but the parents also stand to lose their monetary and social investment into the school.
Well, my kid screwed up!
She took a multitool to school. It has a knife blade.
I'm sure every student will go home and tell their parents that someone had a knife at school. Which is true, and only part of the story.
I am glad she is at a private school, where she was only suspended for the day, vs at a public school with an onduty police officer, where she would have been formally charged and entered into the 'system' (a discussion for another time, but this is one problem I have with SRO and the criminalizing of students for minor offenses and how that leads the schools into a pipeline to prisons).
Suspended for the day; sure I guess that’s “reasonable.”
Personally, my wife and I are glad to have homeschooled our kids.
> In the late 1990s, SRO presence on campuses again increased after the Department of Justice created a $750 million grant program, Cops in School, to hire over 6,500 SROs.
Alternatively, as was the case at my private high school, the small, closed community creates a high level of trust and allows truly awful behavior to be papered over and worked around, because that can line up with the incentives of the community.
Or you could be at an elite private high school, rightly upset about aspects of it, but aware that something which strikes a 14 year old as a pointless abuse of power might actually be the grit for which penicillin and the structure of DNA are the pearls, and desperately hoping that the pervasive homophobia falls in the former category.
Being at a private school won’t stop e.g. kids from being expelled for being caught a single time with a small amount of pot, as happened to my cousin and several of his friends. I guess at least they weren’t referred to the police?
Plenty of zero-tolerance bullshit at (extremely ritzy and exclusive... or any other type of) private schools too.
It’s not like being unaccountable to the local government makes school administrators stop power tripping.
