How Parental Investigations Could Help Save Your Child

Recently, my services were enlisted to help try and help my nephew who has lived with his grandmother all his life and even though he has awesome grades, can not seem to stay in school.   Each day that he goes and my mother does not get a phone call regarding him, she considers it a blessing.  This boy has been in and out of trouble every since he started the 6^th grade.  For some reason or another, my nephew just can’t seem to keep his mouth shut.  I was asked to help fix this problem or suggest something not yet tried.

This one incident that I wish to concentrate on occurred on May 24, 2010.  My mother was called by the school, informing her that my nephew had been suspended for 5 days for fighting. For the sake of brevity, we will not go into all of the nooks and crannies but just give you an overview.  When my nephew got home he began to explain his side of the story and according to him he never threw a punch and in fact allowed the other children to get away with assaulting him.  His offense was a threat that was made by him to the other student and nothing more.  To help him understand why, the only explanation that I could offer was reputation.  If you have a reputation as a “bad egg” in the Rockford School District that is what you will be known by as long as you live there.  This reputation can never be erased but it can be re-written. 

I took a trip to the school to try and understand why, if things were as my nephew said, what would be the purpose of the 5 day suspension.  It was time for me to build my reputation with the school administrators and teachers.  The purpose, according to the Vice-Principal was fighting.  Neither he nor anyone else saw my nephew throw one punch but no one had ever questioned them when fighting is listed on the referral sheets.  The reports written by Mr. Marcus Rouls, a Security Officer at the school and Mrs. Livingston, a teacher at the school both support my nephew’s version of the story.  The third report, written in the third person and supposedly by the teacher who was in the room a Mr. Benassi, says that my nephew did throw a punch while he, the teacher, was standing in between the boys.  Nothing that could have been said would have changed the decision that the administration had already made, I was just a little disappointed that a more through investigation had not been done before suspensions were handed out.  The final charges were code violations 208; Fighting, 328; Staff Assault with or without injury, and 327; Intimidation.

I came away with the following understanding of my local school district.  Teachers and Administration have a very hard job teaching our kids and they have devised ways to help them deal with this fact.  By not being responsible for ever looking for the truth, they can easily avoid any remnants of accountability by handing out suspensions like it was Halloween candy.  They have devised a plan to try and rid the classroom and the school of all of the “bad eggs” that they encounter instead of trying to determine if they are really “bad eggs” or not.  They have not grown tired of trying to teach children who do not wish to learn nor have parents that wish to be parents, so why try.  They feel unappreciated in their chosen profession as well as in their pay which could probably explain why kids in my school district have more days out of school than they do in school.  While many of these are legitimate reasons there is one thing that seems to escape us all.  The one true victim in this crime is not the parents or the administrators and teachers, it’s the kids.  For those of us who take being a parent seriously, performing parental investigations on all things involving your children will not only help you understand the situation better but also help you understand your child better.