A couple decades ago, I coauthored the centennial history of Plainfield’s library. In preparation, I spent weeks sifting through a century’s worth of materials, from board meeting minutes to vintage items promoting then-new services (like access to that nifty Internet contraption).
I was amused to discover that one issue floated to the top of everyone’s attention every few years: frustrations with the behavior of middle and high school students. At the end of the school day, groups of bored teenagers would descend upon the library and do all those things many adults find annoying, like yelling, running around, romancing, gathering in places where they’re in the way – I’m sure you can dream up others. These ill-mannered youngsters would become a nuisance for a few weeks or months, until they became bored with the library and moved on to the next loitering location – typically one of the shopping plazas or a park. After a few years, the cycle began anew, as a fresh crop of kids started annoying library patrons.
Early in my school board term, the loiterer’s hotspot became Plainfield Plaza, and I remember a frustrated town official confronting superintendent Jerry Holifield, insisting, “You need to do something about your kids!” Dr. Holifield gently reminded him that the kids in question belonged to Plainfield families, not the school system.
We count on schools to educate our children. But for some reason, a lot of people think schools should be responsible for much more. Specifically, the behavior and manners exhibited by those students outside the school day. You’ll see it frequently on those delightful chatter pages. Whether the current crop of kids acts up in fast-food restaurants, vandalizes the parks, terrorizes trail-walking seniors with their skateboard mischief, drives faster than they should, or calls someone else’ s child an offensive name, the response is nearly always the same: the schools need to do something about this!
It’s as though these people believe teachers and administrators are somehow responsible for managing young people’s behavior 24 hours a day. Or that if a teacher explains the wrongness of the students’ actions, the students will respond, “Golly, I will never commit such a misdeed again!,” thereby solving the problem.
Others demand schools come up with locations or alternatives to keep kids from causing disruptions elsewhere. Let’s ignore the easily verifiable fact that schools already offer an amazing array of extracurricular activities – far more than you were a student. A kid who sees those activities as inadequately cool isn’t likely to be drawn into something else the principal recommends. Besides, schools can’t mandate student participation in extracurriculars. Then there’s supervision: were you expecting teachers to serve as volunteer monitors for all these new programs? And, of course, there’s the question of funding. The school board can’t increase taxes to add the new program, so they’ll have to eliminate something else to cover its cost.
It’s not just about the behavior of kids. There are a lot of folks for whom the worst part of the day is afterschool pick-up. As someone who lived alongside a school for three decades and knew better than to try and get in or out of my garage twice a day, I feel their pain. (Yes, the school board member who was personally frustrated with the issue couldn’t fix it. The reality is it’s unfixable without making big chunks of the community angry.) Parents who are upset with peers who flout the standard drop-off procedures or speed past stopped school buses demand school officials become traffic cops. But school districts lack legal jurisdiction for traffic enforcement. Nor can principals punish a child or give their parent detention or a demerit for failing to follow the pick-up line rules.
Kids are going to misbehave, and both kids and parents are going to choose to ignore the rules. But that doesn’t mean school districts should be held responsible just because those kids are in classrooms for part of the week. Packing everything the state requires into 180 days of instruction is already impossible. Taking responsibility for the rest of the hours and days is unimaginable.