Well, maybe.
I see Champaign high schools are finally getting the message.
Kinda buried in a NG article on school resource officers (cops in the hall) is this little gem:
The district plans to look at a closed campus for its high schools, meaning students would not be allowed to leave for lunch.Finally. Common sense.
Burley said the schools could not now handle a closed campus, because the buildings don't have a large enough space for lunch for all students. The change would require renovations and changes to class schedules to stagger lunch times.
He said the district will study the possibility of a closed campus this year.
Some of us -- and it would seem a lot of others in the community -- have been preaching the value of a closed campus for quite some time. Maybe now the school administrators have seen the light.
I don't even care if they want to make it sould like it's their own original idea.
If it cuts down on community problems, smoking, littering, running all over town during the day, accidents, consorting with non-student thugs, I'm all for it. I really don't see where it's a right for students to be able to leave school for lunch. It works elsewhere. It can work here.
Maybe.
And so it goes.
4 comments:
This is a classic example of putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps the school board should've created a "closed campus" environment in the first place and determined if that incremental step helped address some of the behavioral concerns raised.
However the City Council and the School board had to rush out immediately and get their flimsy justification to obtain uniformed armed police officers roaming the schools and the city created a youth possession of tobacco ordinance that is heavy on punishment of youth and offers no diversionary or treatment options and completely ignores the merchants who are originally responsible for selling the kids the damn cigarettes in the first place.
This was done by stating there were too many fights and youth smoking going on around the school. I correlated many of these effects as a result of having an open campus environment. Had the city and the school closed the campus in the first place we probably wouldn't have seen the chain reaction of all the recent decisions made nor would we have seen the stigma created about the school being an out of control and dangerous environment for people.
It's a great idea in theory. In practice, the students will certainly protest and possibly make the educational environment much more difficult to learn in than it should be. But then, I've not set foot in a Champaign school for anything other than plays ... in, umm, ever. So, maybe the learning environment isn't all it's cracked up to be there anyway. Maybe students who have disciplinary infractions shouldn't be allowed to leave... but that would mean time and money spent monitoring who goes in and out, and that would be difficult, too.
Lots of therories and maybes in there. Closed campuses have and do work in other high schools. Danville, for example. Don't see how making kids stay in school all day is really going to impact the learning environment as much as you think. It will be the same kids as the day before the doors closed. And a protest. Please. These kids are too self-absorbed to be get anything together anything more complicated than a PBJ. If the administrators can't deal with that, they probably don't deserve to be an administrator. (I come from a family of educators, teachers, principals etc. It's worked elsewhere).
Why the need to go off campus for lunch? Have local schools gotten rid of the lunchroom? If anything, keeping students on campus might improve their diet.
When I was in high school (uh, oh, starting to sound old), I had to get special permission to go off campus to take classes at the local college, let along lunch.
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