Students need grown up mentors

argued the Journal editors this morning, link.

"Athletes need positive role models who set high standards and then help them reach them — not adults who want to be their friends or look the other way."

Of course, the editors only mean that student athletes need role models who don't pay for strippers to entertain them on road trips. The editors would concede also that student athletes need role models who don't allow them to drink alcohol on the bus on a road trip.

The editors apparently don't get that it isn't just student athletes who need role models, and they don't just need role models of self restraint. All students have a need for, and right to, role models of a broad range of personal attributes.

Which makes it all the more confounding that the editors, Kent Walz et al, don't see any problem with the leadership of the APS abdicating as role models of the APS Student Standards of Conduct. They saw nothing wrong when the school board voted unanimously to remove the role modeling clause from the standards of conduct that apply to board members and administrators; the clause which read;

In no case shall the standards of conduct for adults,
be lower than the standards of conduct for students.

Journal editors see nothing wrong with adults holding children accountable to a higher standard of conduct than that to which they will hold themselves accountable. The accept apparently, do as I say, not as I do as a workable premise for guiding the personal development of young people.

Either that, or Kent Walz
pretends to not get it,
only as an excuse to let
Marty Esquivel off the hook
for his corrupt and cowardly
failure as the senior most
role model of student
standards of conduct.

If the Walz asked the
many members of the leadership of the APS if they, individually, were willing to hold themselves honestly accountable to the same standards of conduct that apply to students, the would answer, no. They would not actually say "no" of course, they stonewall the question.

Stonewalling means, no.

Any answer except yes, means no.

Count on Kent Walz to do everything he can to keep the subject of administrative and executive role modeling of student standards of conduct, off the table and out of the discourse,
at least until after his crony Esquivel runs for re-election.




frame grab Mark Bralley