School Board responsible for beating

A Cibola High School student is in the hospital following a fight
at school, link.

The APS School Board is responsible and, I don't mean in a
"the buck stops here" kind of a way.

It is their responsibility and duty to establish district policies
that prevent this kind of misbehavior. It is their duty and
responsibility to make sure that Supt Winston Brooks enforces
those policies.

Clearly, there is no guarantee that even the best policy no
matter how competently enforced will end all fights; but
together they would prevent most fights.

The APS School Board promised this community in 1994,
that they would assume some real responsibility for the
character that students develop at school. They have reneged
on that promise. They have abandoned completely, any
concerted effort to build the character of the 90,000 of our
sons and daughters in the APS.

In so doing, they have created an environment at school where
it is tacitly acceptable to settle disagreements with fistfights.

Their abandonment stems from their unwillingness to be held
accountable to the APS Student Standards of Conduct; the
Pillars of Character Counts!, link.

That is why they struck from their own code of conduct, the
words and the obligation;

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

There is not a single board member or senior administrator
who is willing to hold themselves honestly accountable as a
senior role model of the standards of conduct they establish
and enforce upon students, even for the few hours a day they
hold students accountable to those standards.

It is telling that APS has no written discipline philosophy. The
leadership of the APS has never compiled a comprehensive list
of agreed upon principles that apply to student discipline and
the enforcement of discipline policies. Without a philosophical
foundation, policies become arbitrary and unenforceable.

They avoid the discussion in order to avoid responsibility for
what is fundamentally an administrative failure to maintain
educationally efficient and effective school climates.

It is an administrative responsibility to enforce school discipline
policies. While a teacher has an obvious responsibility to ask
students to stop misbehaving, if the student's response means
"no", when a student defies legitimate authority, that student
and that problem are an administrative responsibility.

Do we really want to spend the time and energy of our best
and brightest teachers on chronically disruptive students, or
do we want to spend them on students who are there to learn?

There are two reasons to avoid an open and honest discussion
of standards and accountability in Albuquerque Public Schools
beginning with the leadership and with honest accountability
as role models of the student standards of conduct;

1. a lack of character, and/or
2. a lack of moral courage

If there is third; I cannot imagine it, and nobody in the leadership
of the APS can articulate it.

Not even Monica Armenta.