TheAgitator.com
Hair Nets and Riot Gear
Friday, November 13th, 2009I remember when using your spoon as a pudding catapult in the school cafeteria at worst earned you a trip to the principal’s office. Possibly detention.
Now? It triggers a full-fledged police action, followed by arrest, booking, and eight hours in the pokey for the teen and pre-teen tater tot tossers.
The food fight here started the way such bouts do in school lunchrooms most anywhere: an apple was tossed, a cookie turned into a torpedo, and an orange plunked someone in the head. Within minutes, dozens of middle-school students had joined in the ruckus, and spattered adults were ducking for cover.
By the end of the day, 25 of the students, ages 11 to 15, had been rounded up, arrested, taken from school and put in jail. A spokesman for the Chicago police said the charges were reckless conduct, a misdemeanor…
“My children have to appear in court,” Erica Russell, the mother of two eighth-grade girls who spent eight hours in jail, said Tuesday. “They were handcuffed, slammed in a wagon, had their mug shots taken and treated like real criminals.”
“They’re all scared,” Ms. Russell said of the two dozen arrested students. “You never know how children will be impacted by that. I was all for some other kind of punishment, but not jail. Who hasn’t had a food fight?”
School Zero Tolerance Policy = Zero Intelligence Policy.
We have lost the ability to reason in this country, and there is absolutely no proportion anymore in punishment.
Maybe this is the start of the War on Food Fights?
Reckless conduct? Sounds like you could be charged with reckless conduct for such petty things as riding your bike without a helmet, spinning around to make yourself dizzy, and walking backwards in the school hallway. I mean, really, WTF is reckless conduct and how did it become a misdemeanor?
Whomever’s idea it was to arrest these kids should be fired from whatever BS job they hold right now.
We have way too many police officers in this country, and they have way too much free time on their hands.
And why the heck not? Today, it’s tossing butterscotch pudding, tomorrow, it’s an AK-47! Teach those riotous savages that such behaviour will result in jail time and heavy fines. Take our schools back from these unruly youths!
School is a place for order! And discipline! And submission to authority! (And something else that escapes me at the moment…)
I am not quite so cynical to believe this is a continuation of a grand plan to instill deference and fear of authority in our younger generations, but I believe it has occurred to people who could do something about it, and they in turn chose to do nothing.
Hey, I’m all for it. I say the sooner we get everyone into the DNA/fingerprint/mugshot data base, the better. Too many people are evading the system by pretending to be law abiding citizens. They remain below the radar until, BAMM!, they blow up a preschool or have a relationship with a farm animal. Then everyone looks at each other wondering how someone like that could have gone undetected when there had to have been clear “warning signs” like getting angry at classmate or, you guessed it, a violent food fight, where an apple is just a metaphor for what they really want to be throwing: fleash consuming white phosphorous grenades. If you look into the past of Nidal Hassan, you’re bound to find a food fight. People don’t become maniacs over night.
People are dangerous. You gotta watch ‘em.
I’m sure Michael West will be able to get some bite marks off the half eaten apples, sandwiches etc and trace them to heinous murders committed 20 years ago in Alabama.
Oops. I just noticed. Pegr beat me at my own game. :)
Any sensible school would have simply made the kids clean up the mess.
But that would have been taking jobs away from the janitor’s union, so the police were obviously the only option left.
I thank the little baby jeebus I went to public school in the good ol days (1980’s) when our Principal, if you got sent to his office, liked to discuss our toughts and feeeeeelings on why we insisted on whacking each other with our coat sleeves in the cafeteria.
Kirsten
Ah, yes, the wimpy 80s children! Who didn’t get “the strap” because it might bruise their little egos.
;P
“Diana Shulla-Cose, president and co-founder of Perspectives Charter Schools, said that an on-campus police officer…”
Well there’s your problem.
I see no problem with calling the police. If these little shits want to act like animals, let them suffer the consequences of such.
#9 – Dave:
“Oops. I just noticed. Pegr beat me at my own game.”
What? A game? All this time I thought you were serious. Well, shit! Looks like it’s back to Hannity for me.
When I was a kid, instead of trying to reason with us little pricks, they could throw our asses out if we caused problems. That was back in the days when two-parent households and discipline were still popular concepts and before CPS was created as a advocacy authority for kids who have trouble controlling their parents.
Dave K
I bet your dad wouldn’t let you use the horse and buggy on Saturday nights, either.
;)
To hell with America. It can’t be reformed, it can’t be fixed. We can only hope its destroyed soon so maybe we can start all over.
I blame this kind of behavior sqaurly on the removal of smoking area’s from the schools . when i was in school we had a smoking area for the student’s and we did not have guns or shooting’s or all this crap that they have today. we have turned our public schools in to PC battle grounds for the parents who were such pussies when they were kids that they had no lives and now are hell bent on proving that they are not now. even though they would run at the first sign of real trouble or the chance that they might be embarrased in public . this country has become a nation of pussy’s and will get exactly what it deserves for raising a generation of blindly obedient morons that could not come up with an original thought if their life depended on it.
If I worked for the school I’d just be embarrassed.
I just hope they checked these kids’ underwear for Ibuprofen.
““They’re all scared,” Ms. Russell said of the two dozen arrested students. “You never know how children will be impacted by that.”
”
I believe that’s the point, Ms. Russell – fear with unquestioning submission to authority.
the students must have gotten food on an administrator.
Well, back in the 70s the penalty for throwing a grape (applied to both the person throwing and person unlucky enough to be hit) was a paddling, and cleaning the cafeteria in place of lunch break for a week.
The unfairness of this caused us to grow up into libertarian misfits who read The Agitator. If we’d been processed into the county jail, and given a criminal record that popped up every time we get a traffic stop, board a plane, or apply for a job, we’d probably have turned out better.
Robert Chambers you should do the world a favor and go kill yourself.
I noticed that this occurred in Chicago. (The land of the bribe, and the home of Obama.) I believe the children were jailed because they didn’t have the wherewithal to provide funds to the appropriate school administrators, city aldermen, and mayoral campaign fund. The kids learned an important lesson: next time they’ll know who to pay off to avoid jail.
Geez. When I was in high school, there was a food fight that actually led to a hospitalization (though fortunately for the kid with the peanut allergy who was hit in the face with a PB&J sandwich, the hospital was next door). But nobody was arrested, or even suspended. And this was in the degenerate 2000s in the era of zero tolerance. Somehow our principal (otherwise not terribly impressive) managed to cope with student discipline without police back-up.
@woodbutcher: Apologies in advance for the snark, but if the lack of smoking areas leads to turning schools into PC battlegrounds, then I’m going to go ahead and blame the presence of student smoking areas for the widespread failure to use the apostrophe properly. Obviously if students were out in the smoking area they weren’t in class learning how to punctuate.
This is overkill.
Just withhold their food until they show they’re ready to treat it right.
Obviously [COMMA] if students were out in the smoking area [COMMA] they weren’t in class learning how to punctuate.
Hate to break it to you, Dr. T., but not every sordid thing that goes on in Chicago is Obama’s fault.
You all really need to retire that line. It makes you look ridiculous.
At #24
Lookin’ out the window; that’s a paddlin’. Starin’ at my sandals; that’s a paddlin’. Paddlin’ the school canoe; oh you better believe that’s a paddlin’.
Obviously if students were out in the smoking area they weren’t in class learning how to punctuate.
Punctuation & spelling didn’t really come up alot in woodshop and being that i wanted to be a carpenter and not a english teacher the smoking area was a fair trade for english skills. plus it gave me the patience i needed not to throw food at people .
And since spanish is spoken more than english on most job sights now any way
i don’t see the harm in me skipping english and math to have a joint or a cigg while trying to meet girls .
why else would a 16-17 yr old male go to school .
you dont actually think a kid that age is paying attention to any thing except weather the girl he’s interested in put’s out do you ?
I know that much at least has not changed since i was a kid.
Food fights were rampant at Texas A&M in the 70’s, when I was there. I have to tell you that I think that had the campus police tried to arrest food-fighters, the Corps of Cadets (along with their sabers) and a good part of the student body would have surrounded the cops to prevent it. That’s why they never tried to use police to stop the fights. Although we never demonstrated against the Vietnam War (the corps of cadets, you know) , we were able to arrange campus-wide boycotts and resistance to various administration-spawned initiatives within a couple of hours that caused them to completely buckle.
This story reinforces my determination to continue arguing that parents should home school their children. I don’t like food fights because the results make me want to upchuck, but I like using government goons to stop them even less. We have forgotten the art of self-governance and the use of police proves that.
InMD,
Always love a good Simpsons reference!
In my day the PE teacher would be called in, the instigators identified (whether it was the right kids or not), he would grab a woven leather belt specifically designed for it’s purpose, the kids would be instructed to grab their ankles and a note would be sent home with those disciplined.
Most of the time if someone decided to start something, the other kids would squelch it before it escalated; on the conceptual merit that discipline was dolled out to both those that deserved it and those that did not. Justice was usually served after the event.
On one hand, I’m fine with arresting the delinquents. On the other hand, perhaps just beatings plus suspensions plus KP or something might have done just as well.
Can’t really work up any sympathy for the convicts either way, however.
Not to excuse this, but it’s worth noting that a high school kid was beaten to death not long ago during an after school brawl just a few miles away. And so far this year, something like 40 CPS students have been killed. So everyone is a little on edge and likely to overreact. This isn’t just blind exercise of authority, or the unintended consequences of Zero Tolerance policies–it’s even worse. They’re genuinely scared shitless.
> not every sordid thing that goes on in Chicago is Obama’s fault.
> You all really need to retire that line. It makes you look ridiculous.
Radley,
Where did Dr. T. blame Obama for this?
He merely mentioned that Chicago is the land of bribes, and that Obama is from Chicago.
“Obviously if students were out in the smoking area they weren’t in class learning how to punctuate.”
tariqata, meet facebook.com . It has so much to teach you.
Dr. T, obviously the administration was embarrassed that 25 middle school kids, including girls apparently, threw better than Obama. I’m not sure this can be solved with a few Bens.
@wheeler: Nah, had they gotten food on an administrator the charge would’ve been battery with a deadly weapon. Sending the little punk down the river for a felony would teach them to think twice before they recklessly aimed their mashed potatoes toward innocent victims again.
By the way, I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but articles and reports like this should be required reading for anti-2nd amendment types.
Learn, young citizens that it is not you who are in control, it is we, the state.
Comply and there will be no problems. But you must always obey and not question, or display unapproved emotion.
When I was in Jr. High in the late 60’s, our vice-principal, Mr. Pinney would walk around school carrying a huge (or so it seemed) paddle with holes bored into it. Only the stupidest kids didn’t get the message!
Now we know why John Belushi died.
Bluto was a PROPHET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No mention of the predominant race of the children in question.
Since it’s South Side, I’m going to assume the majority of the children were black.
Makes one wonder if a food fight broke out on the North Side or in Lake Forest, if the police response would have been similarly heavy-handed.
I mean, I’ve seen a lot of John Hughes films and in none of them are white students engaging in a food fight arrested by the police.
Maybe it’s just me. I’m surprised I’m the first to bring up race — not only in the article itself, but on this comments page.
I guess school really does prepare you for the future. A future of being mistreated and maligned by police and authority figures for minor offenses. But at least America is free, and the children are safe.
Welcome to the Police State, Mr. and Mrs. Russell. Here in America, they identify the person they want to persecute and then find a crime to fit. It’s all “for the children”
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