APS' fight club

fight club, in this context;

students making deliberate decisions to meet somewhere on campus, there to have what amounts to "no holds barred" fistfights that on occasion result in disfiguring and even fatal injuries.

KRQE and the evidence, link, suggest there might be a fight club in APS High Schools. There is no good reason to suppose that there wouldn't be; for a lot of reasons, some of which we could actually be doing something about.

For every problem there are a finite number of solutions.

For every problem involving administrative misconduct or incompetence, there are fewer solutions. The solutions are fewer by the number of; any solutions that would include individual identification of the administrator and then holding them actually accountable.

The first administrative and executive priority in times of trouble, is to make sure no one hears about it. A simple test for doubters; go to APS' award winning website, pick a school you have an interest in, and then try to find out how many fist fights there were at that school; how many drug busts; how many weapons have been found.

How can you solve a problem while at the same time hiding it?
Real, effective and efficient solutions are needlessly rejected,
just so some board member or administrator doesn't have to
do a perp walk, wikilink; just so some principal doesn't have
to admit s/he has lost control over their school.

The likelihood of fight clubs in APS schools is inversely proportional to the control adults have over students at any particular school.

When students are out of the control of adults, when students no longer recognize adult authority, there will be fight clubs. There will be all kinds of manifest disrespect for the authority of adults over students.

The authority of teachers over students, the authority of adults over children, is fundamental to education. That authority has been lost; given away actually.

The administration gave it away when they started letting students get away with telling a teacher, fuck you!

If you asked the leadership of the APS who is "in charge" in our public schools, they would tell you, they are.

Who is in really in charge; the adults that establish the rules, or the students who deliberately ignore them? The person is in charge, whose will is being done.

I will tell you that in any school where students deliberately ignore the rules, those students are in charge.

The enforcement of district and school site discipline is first and foremost an administrative responsibility. Any problems with student discipline overall, rest on administrative shoulders.

It is a teacher's responsibility to point out to a student; their disruptive behavior and to ask them to stop it. If the student's response means "no", the student's defiance belongs in the principal's office, not in a classroom and not instead of the ongoing education of as many as thirty other students.

That APS' discipline policies are so feckless, has to do with the fact that the leadership of the APS has never taken the time as to identify and articulate the District Student Discipline Philosophy. Policies without philosophical foundation are like ships without rudders. You can't tell a student who asks why he can't do something (on a philosophical level) because I told you so, and expect to get away with it.

Nowhere is there even so basic a philosophical fundamental as whether students who deliberately ignore the rules should be punished, or given yet another second chance. No where is it written that students must submit to the authority of adults at school. Incredibly, APS Supt Winston Brooks established a discipline policy for middle schools that places a student blatantly disobeying an adult as one of the most minor of offenses.

From an administrative perspective, it's easier to let students run all over the adults at school, than it is to get sued by some parent who thinks their kid was punished unfairly. In particular if they are never held accountable for students running amok, if they never have to communicate openly and honestly about student discipline in the APS.

If the leadership of the APS admitted there are fight clubs in APS middle and high schools, maybe elementary schools, they would have to answer questions about them.

They don't want to do that, so they just pretend instead, there are no fight clubs. Meanwhile, they will do their level best working diligently to address the problem on the QT.

They will fail. They will fail because it is impossibly difficult to solve a problem that requires community intervention and involvement, while at the same time keeping the community in the dark about the problem.

An illustrative example;

Our School Restructuring Council (parents, teachers, administrators) was summoned to a meeting by Hoover MS Principal H Wayne Knight. He wanted us to rubber stamp his movement of lunch duty personnel from where they were actually needed, to surveil a girls' bathroom instead. Why? he told us, someone had been "smoking" in there.

When he saw we weren't going to move anyone to guard a bathroom a few yards from his office, he finally told us that the student had been smoking marijuana in there.

Still unmoved, we adjourned leaving him to watch over his own bathroom.

Rather than tell the truth to the people who were charged with finding solutions; rather than being candid, forthright, and honest with them; he began the process of finding a solution for a problem while at the same time, trying to hide the problem (so neither he nor his school would "look bad").

The point is; he was trying to solve a "problem" without actually admitting that there was a problem in the first place. Failure is as predicable as it is inevitable.

We cannot solve the problem of chronically disruptive students in classrooms without admitting they exist.

A recent audit by the Council of the Great City Schools found that APS administrators routinely falsified crime and violence statistics to protect the reputations of their schools and the district in general.

A million dollar "communications" effort is going to vanish the problem of fight clubs in APS, long enough for administrators to figure out how to end the fighting without talking to students about it.

And sooner or later; a "good" kid is going to get his teeth slammed into a curb, over and over again, just so some bullies can get on YouTube.

The establishment media; the Journal, KRQE, KOAT, KOB, KKOB, will continue their aid and abet;

Ethics and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS ...? We don't see any scandal. We don't see anything at all.