To be entirely fair about the depths to which Americans have sunk, the police are the only acceptable way to transport anyone nowadays.

The principal, or any staffer, must be assumed to be guilty of child endangerment otherwise.

Police, apparently, are what the people want. Everywhere.

If this had been 1970, the kid's parents would have been told to come get them.

I just read this out loud to Daughter #2 who said "that is just so stupid! What does the school hope to accomplish with a rule like that? Why do they have a rule like that in the first place?"

I'd like to know, myself.

Here’s a good piece from the First Amendment Center on school uniforms. Interestingly, one of the main points of school uniforms is to lessen the perceived socioeconomic division between students. Like so many government-instituted rules, it was bound to backfire.

Assuming we're getting the whole story in the Yahoo News link, it seems the little boy's biggest problem was being unable to afford suitable shoes. If that's the case, the issue becomes, "how do we ensure the child is properly shod?"

But that would have required a dangerous amount of thought and judgment on the part of school administration. My guess is that "zero tolerance" policies like that inflicted on the little boy and his mother are designed as much to eliminate the need for judgment (and the risk it entails) as to enforce standard discipline.

They probably want the black shoes because of gang colors

not a case out of The Onion

NAcooTO

If you say it out loud, it sounds African.

Of course there is no way to justify turning a 5-year-old over to the police for wearing the wrong color of shoes. But the Yahoo article is about a report on the racial disparity in discipline of school children in Mississippi schools.

From the article: "The report... claimed that black students are affected by harsh disciplinary actions at a much greater rate than their white peers. It notes that “for every one white student who is given an out-of-school suspension, three black students are suspended, even though black students comprise just half of the student population.”"

There have been many reports pointing out this discrepancy in discipline between black and white students. Of course the difference is attributed to racial prejudice.

None of the reports ever say whether black students do in fact misbehave more often than white students. If black students make up half of the student population, are disciplined three times more often than white students, and are the source of 90% of the misbehavior, then the discrimination is in their favor, and they are less likely to be disciplined for any given act of misbehavior. But the reports never attempt to explore this possibility.

None of the reports ever talk about the racial makeup of the staff imposing the discipline at the schools, or whether there is any difference in the severity of discipline imposed by white school officials versus black school officials.

They quote experts at academic institutions in New York and Pennsylvania, a racial justice activist in Washington, DC, and an ACLU lawyer. But they don't seek much input from teachers and administrators working at the schools in Mississippi where all this alleged injustice is taking place.

If the reason for the difference in discipline is anything other than racial prejudice, they don't want to find it out.

Our school has uniforms. It was supposed to eliminate distractions and social disparity. Then, they said they would allow Polos with the Ralph lauren symbol on them because they are higher quality. So, the kids still clearly know who has money and who doesn't. Dumb.

There is no shame in being poor! Only in dressing poorly! (from "Zorro: The Gay Blade")

This kind of behavior should be regarded and prosecuted as child abuse - abusing your position of power to unnecessarily torment and victimize an innocent child.

Yet another example of why I pulled my younger daughter out of the brick-and-mortar public school and put her in an online school at home.

Public schools have become a travesty. I weep for the children still caught in their web, their lives being drained and the poison of PC and the idiocy of zero tolerance policies forced upon them.

Have school budgets gotten so tight that they didn't have a black Sharpie in the office to do a little touch up? It's like they went out of their way to humiliate the youngster. So sad.

"The child was escorted out of school so he and his mother would be taught a lesson."

Oh, they learned a lesson all right. Just not the one that was intended.

I read an article or editorial many years back that the author suggested the school uniform should be jeans or knee length plus denim skirts, button down shirts and or sweaters over a collared shirt, and sneakers.

The children will generally blend in whether they are wearing Wal-Mart Faded Glory or Sassoon jeans. The knee length skirts give the religious their freedoms. The button down shirts are generally not going to have a logo on them except for something embroidered. That can be addressed as needed. Sneakers are so generic; even if they are black and orange. Yes, you'll have the Air Jordan's and such every once in a while, but those are going to be rare.

With the exception of the shirt -- that is the uniform of kids anyway.

This suspension is in the same vein as the Hello Kitty shooting threat. The schools administration is there to administer the school not cleave to arbitrary rules. They need to be administrative law judges and view the teachers as prosecutors, and know the teachers like a judge knows the prosecutors he deals with. Then weigh the accusation, the teacher and the student and make a sound judgement.

If they can't do that, then they need to find a new profession.

It seems like there's a lot of information missing from the shoe story. Even in the original paper, "Handcuffs on Success," there's no news story associated. The authors note that they have a video interview with the child's parents on file. That's it. It isn't available to the public.

The sneakers were not red and white. They were BLACK with a red and white emblem: http://b.3cdn.net/advancement/bd691fe41faa4ff809_u9m6bfb3v.pdf

So it sounds like his mom bought black sneakers that didn't meet the dress code. Maybe this school has rules about designer logos.

Do we have reason to believe this kid was "too poor" to have the proper footwear, or are you enjoying a popular narrative? It wasn't his first day, so he probably had the right shoes previously or maybe had been given several warnings. It sounds more like Mom bought the wrong sneakers, and not necessarily cheaper ones.

The "teach him a lesson" quote is third hand.

Assuming this one-sided account is true, it doesn't sound like the cops "nabbed" the kid. He was sent home by his school for violating the dress code, and the school called the cops to take him home. Like Radwaste says, there's probably no legally alternative way.

"Handcuffs on Success" isn't even criticizing police. It's alleging that schools in Mississipi are disciplining black children disproportionately--so much so that the kids can't recover and thrive.

Before I could agree, I would want to know whether white kids have been sent home for the same infraction. [I just realized Ken R says the same thing above.]

Even if the kid has a closet full of appropriate black shoes, wore the wrong sneakers on purpose and told the principal to suck it, calling the police to take him home is overkill. It's wrong even if it's happening to white kids in equal numbers, which somehow I doubt.

Monica, I'm not sure it is. There's not enough information here to say.

Look, there's no point in having a dress code if you don't enforce it. For all we know there were multiple transgressions and they called the mother to take him home--which is a normal punishment for repeat dress-code violations--and she refused to come get him. Maybe the alternative was spelled out to her. Maybe he was sent home for a different reason or multiple reasons, and the mother chose to tell it as being about the shoes. Only one person's account is reported.

The assumption that people here are embracing is that a kindergarten teacher spied a little kid whose impoverished mother had made a desperate attempt to conform to the dress code and callously called the police just because she could. Then the police responded as if to a crime. That doesn't sound believable to me. I think people just eat up these kinds of stories.

The subject for this blog post says the cops apprehended a child for being too poor to have the right shoes, and I can't see any evidence that that is what happened.

What I object to is using police resources to enforce school rules. If the kid was sent home and the mother wouldn't come to get him, other punishments can be enforced -- by the school. Unless the kid was committing an actual crime or his life was in danger, and there's no evidence of either, calling the police was unreasonable.

If it turns out that the kid was running around stabbing people, I will be happy to adjust my opinion.

To add: I went to a Catholic elementary school. We had a few habitual dress code violators. The punishment was detention or, in some rare cases, in- or out-of-school suspension. Sometimes the kid had to write "I will not violate the dress code" a hundred times. No one ever called the cops.

I still don't agree with you. If the school disciplinary policy is to send a child home for a particular infraction, and the parent won't get the kid, then you have the same situation as when a parent doesn't get his kid from daycare.

If you make an exception, then all parents will learn to refuse to get the kid--and really with this type of issue it's the parents you're going after. If you don't follow our rules, we will inconvenience you.

Similar situations have arisen with kids getting suspended because their parents were chronically late dropping them off. Was it fair to the kids? No, but the school had to take a stand and follow its own rules to be fair to everyone else.

And I'll say one more time: "School has police drive kid home" is a heck of a lot different from "Cops target child for being poor."

I still don't agree with you. Suspension is fine. I have no problem with that. Calling the police to enforce it is ridiculous if there's no violence or crime involved. The cops are not the enforcement arm of the local school system, or shouldn't be. If parents won't pick the kids up, suspend the kids. Just don't both the police with this stuff.

It's not a crime to wear the wrong shoes or to refuse to pick your kid up from school (if that actually happened here). There's no evidence that the mother refused. If we're going to start assuming things just because they weren't explicitly ruled out in the article, it's possible that the principal dragged the kid into a storage closet and slapped him around before calling the cops. After all, the article doesn't say. But there's no reason to assume that.

Whether the school was targeting the kid for being poor or just being lazy and moronic seems irrelevant. They had a 5-year-old driven home in a police car (which might very well have been terrifying, and at the very least tied up those cops from doing real work) over a dress-code infraction.

Reminds me of the hilarious 1980s Adrian Mole series (British) by Sue Townsend. There are several books.

Thursday June 4th
"Doreen answered the phone to my mother first thing this morning. My mother asked to speak to me. She demanded to know what Doreen was doing in the house. I told her that my father was having a breakdown and that Doreen Slater was looking after him. I told her about his redundancy. I said he was drinking heavily, smoking too much and generally letting himself go. Then I went to school. I was feeling rebellious, so I wore red socks. It is strictly forbidden but I don't care any more."

You can see the 1985 TV episode here - the relevant part starts after 8 minutes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxRAFDXGnE4

"Struggling to come to terms with his mother's departure, Adrian wears red socks to school, which sees him sent home by the headmaster, Mr. Scruton. His furious father complains to Mr. Scruton, and Adrian's love interest Pandora Braithwaite organises a 'red sock protest' at the school, which brings her and Adrian together. Meanwhile, Adrian's friend Bert Baxter (aged 89) is taken to hospital with breathing difficulties."

Monica, I've used the hypothetical to demonstrate that people are having strong reactions to a story with a LOT of missing information. That a school would try to reach a parent before sending him home with the police is quite plausible. "The principal roughed him up in a closet" is writing a new story entirely. There is NO reason to think that.

When an article one-sidedly portrays one party as a ridiculous villain, I question it. This is just one parent's personal account on a video retained by the authors of the paper.

I disagree that the police were being used to "enforce" or punish in the scenario described. Being delivered to your parents' care by the police is not being arrested for a crime, even if the kid finds it scary.

Ah, children.

You can't live with 'em, you can't tape 'em into a plastic storage box and pour water through the air hole.

http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-couple-admits-putting-kids-plastic-boxes-131131032.html