http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35258118/

Just read it myself in the NYC paper. Absofreakinlutely ridiculous. But this goes back to a decision Bloomberg made a couple years ago when he gave NYPD charge of school security.

Wonder what this will do to the home schooling rate in NYC?

OTOH, things must be pretty good, security-wise, if the police have time for this sort of action.

washable marker.....maybe they could have had her clean it off?

I'm not seeing where this was a security threat. Ridiculous.

From NYCLU http://www.nyclu.org/news/2-weeks-after-...ed-desk-do

A little more history there and this tidbit:

Quote:Since the NYPD took control of public school safety in New York City in 1998, more than 5,000 School Safety Officers, NYPD employees assigned to the schools, and nearly 200 armed police officers have been assigned to the city’s public schools. This massive presence makes the NYPD’s School Safety Division the nation’s fifth largest police force – larger than the police forces in Washington D.C., Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, San Diego or Las Vegas.

Now as someone who used to go in and out of some pretty bad schools b/c of my caseload, I can tell you there was a need for a strong school safety presence in the schools. BUT. like having only a hammer makes every problem look like a nail, being trained by the NYPD makes every situation look like a criminal situation. I also wonder how the safety officer got involved in the first place - what teacher would call a safety officer into the classroom to report graffitti? (then again, a school principal was decked and knocked unconsious trying to break up a middle-school cafeteria fistfight between two girls earlier this week.)

I fully respect the need to increase security in schools and I fully acknowledge the need to "get tough" to make schools safe. But really...there needs to be a boundary between expected school infractions, such as doodling on a desk, and violent disruptive and dangerous actions..

Make the punishment fit the crime. A crime of writing on a desk should equal a punishment of cleaning the desk, or maybe even cleaning all the desks in the classroom. I question why the teacher wasn't able to set up appropriate rules and consequences without calling in the police.

It does sound ridiculous. I wonder what that school is like- is the teacher afraid of making the students obey the rules? No matter what, arresting her was absurd.

In defense of teachers calling cops, I think we've all seen the cases where the teachers (or school admins) punish the kid and then the parent comes in screaming and yelling about it. Some parents create kids who simply will not listen to school authority because the parent constantly undermines that authority. Every case I've seen on television news where the cops were arresting a 5-year old had a parent who refused to let the school discipline their kid. I don't know what the whole background is in this case. Maybe the teacher is nuts. Maybe the school has weird policies. Maybe the kid is in trouble a lot and has one of these parents. Another aspect is that the school can't ever defend themselves in the media in these cases because they are not allowed to comment on private student information. Calling the cops in this case? Extreme. Unjustified? I don't know if we can ever know for sure because the information we receive will be one-sided unless the school disciplines or fires a teacher or staff member over it.

NYC also had the recent Lego Gun Kid: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-bea...02102.html

Principal apologized in doodle case: http://www.wlbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=11950582

Amy's right that we only get the student/parent POV in the cases, and that there could be other factors we don't know about, but in some of these cases, the child would have to have one hell of a looooooooooong record of being a Spawn of Satan to justify police calls for incidents this minor in magnitude. The problem is the NYCLU has been monitoring all the student arrests across the system (after suing to get the data under FOIA) and have found systematic school arrests for low-level offenses over the past few years.