Who is Delaware’s Super Nintendo Chalmers
Delaware is trying to rebound after the shooting at William Penn High School earlier this week. Today The News Journal ran an article about the place of violence in our schools and in our society. So let’s go to the Superintendent George Meney. William Penn H.S. is in the Colonial School District which is run by Meney.
Mr. Meney what do you have to say about this incident?
It speaks to what’s going on in society. I don’t think any of us adults realize the world our kids live in today. They don’t have any respect for life.
Really? That’s your statement to the press about your students? You might be in the wrong job.
Let’s journey a little further north to the Brandywine School District, who just had a senior shot in the head (outside of school). Brandywine Superintendent James Scanlon what do you have to say?
I think kids are making some bad decisions. And I think it’s bigger than a school or police. I think it’s at a point where an entire community needs to come together to try to address all this and help kids make better decisions.
After reading these two statements about violence in our society and how children deal with them, I don’t think I could be happier about our move five years ago from the Colonial School District to the Brandywine School District.
I am sure that your decision to move the kids to the BSD is a good one.
But the larger problems sadly won’t go away. I don’t know what the answer is. Make guns hard to procure? Isn’t this something parents have a role in?
Don’t know just thinking aloud. BTW I live in the BSD too.
I’ve been very impressed with Scanlon all along, though I’m sure Kilroy can let me know why I shouldn’t be. 😉
We live in Red Clay and choice our kids into BSD. I’m impressed with Scanlon.
What about parents?
Are we not the people responsible for setting limits and instilling values?
Maybe now y’all realize why everyone in New Castle County who can afford to send their kids to private schools do.
When we lived in Hockessin, our daughters went to Corpus Christi.
Mr Protack: I’m thinking that your linked website is a little bit out of date! 🙂
But yes, absolutely, that’s what parents are supposed to do.
Blame parents, blame teachers, blame administrators, blame MTV, blame video games, blame, blame blame.
Maybe if we stopped blaming we’d find a solution.
Pandora: you can’t find a solution until you determine where responsibility lays.
Well, maybe if everybody stopped pointing fingers at each other we’d address the problem seriously. Believe me, there’s enough blame to go around.
Okay Dana, can I assume you believe the problem lies with the parents? If so… what’s your solution?
If not, where do you see the responsibility fall?
When punks walk around malls wearing “Stop Snitching” T-shirts and pimps and drug peddlers are the local role models, we might get a hint about a societal problem.
I thought that the Great Society was supposed to bring us heaven and earth? Didn’t LBJ get his inspiration from a crooked Illinois Governor named Kerner and make the thug a Federal Judge?
the problem can not lie within the school. The parents MUST take responsibility. They are the roll models of their children. Children often mimick what their parents do and the way the parents treat life. If children see parents having no regard to human life, it is more likely that the childrend won’t either. BTW my children attend Red Clay for the last 14 years and we are very happy with the results.
This makes me way too happy that I go to Cab.
Mat, dont be too happy because some people within this state want to do away with Charter Schools. Its a shame that the school where you are surronded by peers that WANT to attend school and learn may soon go away.
Cab’s not a charter school. Charter’s upstairs.
Still waiting for a solution…
how about parents that are accountable for their actions as well as for the children. Parents that don’t get upset at school for setting up rules, enforcing them, then saying ‘not my son or daughter, it wasn’t their fault’.
Wow, the amount of generalizations in the commentary is amazing.
If DV is one’s role model, does that put one in the ‘danger zone’?
do you think that the students at either school have respect for human life if they will take to shooting one another? How do you see that a community begin to come together for a solution to the problem? Should it be the schools or ultimately the parents to take responsibilty for the actions of their children?
How about we stop placing blame and playing lip service and actually deal with the problems. How about actually investing in high poverty schools, reducing class size, and restoring programs such as Talented and Gifted and Technology. How about we try and create an environment that counters a lousy home life.
How about we stop stereotyping an entire group of children while patting ourselves on the back and pinning our self-appointed parenting badges on our chests.
Teaching peace and stop glorifying war would be a start.
I agree with your first set of points. The question then is how are you going to pay for it? Would parents that send their children to private schools be willing to send their children then to the public schools? With regards to Talented and Gifted, I agree with you, but there has been feelings that this is not PC because the schools are highlighting the better students and how would the child that is not in the group feel.
I am not trying to stereotype an entire group but I from my exp with attending school board meetings, PTA meeting I have heard many excuses that the school has failed the child. It must begin at home. If we have stable home that in your words aren’t ‘lousy home lifes’ do you think that it would make a difference?
For some reason I am waiting to see how this is spun to be Dave Burris’ fault.
I blame the kids, parents, war on
your neighbordrugs, and capitalistic nature of our judicial system. Educators? Not really. Most are capable of doing there job well.Successfully educating a child is like making a delicious meal: The chef knows only the freshest, best ingredients will do. So when the store delivers spoiled and rotten provisions, don’t expect the best outcome.
Shorter: It starts and ends at home….wherever that may be.
Any attempt to quickly set blame in this type of situation is inevitably going to be an oversimplification.
Then again as someone who taught high school for a couple years and is now in the educational research biz (so to speak), the sheer ratios are something that have always struck me.
What I mean by that is this: when I taught high school, I had let’s say approximately 120 students for whom I was responsible (and that number is probably on the low side – 6 classes times 20-30 students each is the point). Just to make the math easy, let’s say I saw each of those students for 4 hours a week (5 days x 50 minutes per day for their class = 250 minutes, round down to 240 for time spent taking roll and doing other non-instructional stuff).
If you do a simple division that averages out to 2 minutes of individual attention per student per week.
In contrast, the average parent has what, 1-4 kids that they see for at least 3-4 hours a night during the school week plus many more hours on the weekend.
I guess my point is this. Yes we need qualified teachers who are talented in their craft. But we also need parents who (ideally) make some attempt to reinforce what the teachers have been doing and support their children’s learning OR (at a minimum) at least set up a home environment that produces students who are well equipped to learn when they get to school – i.e. well rested, sufficiently fed, appropriately clothed and supplied, etc.
Clap clap clap for JohnnyX!
Great points.
How about actually investing in high poverty schools, reducing class size..Pandora
That really worked in the District of Columbia.
Throwing money at a problem does not assure a positive outcome.
With the NEA and the Dems joined at the hip, how can we expect reform? What the educational establishment fears most is competition. Let’s have vouchers and more charter schools.
“Let’s have vouchers and more charter schools.”
So ridiculously simplistic!
I’m not opposed to charter schools on principle, I prefer to consider their relative value on a case by case basis. But I find the idea that charter schools and vouchers are some kind of magical solution to all the problems of education to be quite comical.
The typical republican viewpoint on charter schools and vouchers seems to be this: the public schools are chock full of underachieving students (read poor black and hispanic students). We don’t want our promising youth (read middle to upper class class white and asian kids) to have to deal with that crap, now do we? So how about we create an environment where our promising students (see above) have the chance to excel (i.e. a publicly funded private school set up to keep the poor, black, and hispanic kids out). Or better yet why don’t we give ourselves the option to just send our kids to a real private school but not have to pay for it?
Sounds great except…what happens to the poor black and hispanic kids?
The republican response: who gives a fuck, their parents aren’t voting for us anyway…
JohnnyX,
Not to mention:
We want our kids to pray to the christainist god in school everyday and we don’t want our kids to learn about evolution and sex.
“Would parents that send their children to private schools be willing to send their children then to the public schools?”
Odd that you think this is a way of getting more money to public schools. If you count capitalization (school building) costs, the state and school district spend up to $17K per student per year. Every child out of public school saves taxpayers that much money. How, pray tell, would sending an extra 25,000 kids to public school make it somehow cheaper for taxpayers?
Yes, I know the liberal answer to this one — if everyone sent their kids to public school, those private-school parents would put their talents to use in public schools and would support referendums for more funding. Forget the lack of evidence to support this claim — it’s just like the twisted thinking from liberals that we needed a draft so rich people would have a greater stake in wars. Right. That worked so well in the Vietnam era.