…needs traffic wardens and parking wardens - who could be given the necessary legal authority for such situations, but do not need to be armed police officers. And in any event traffic and parking all happens outside the school. It is a huge jump from ‘traffic and parking needs close management’ to ‘we need police to manage the enforcement of pupils’ school discipline, inside the school’ There is no rationale for having police officers in the schools themselves.
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While I don’t doubt your experience, to provide an example of how things could be different:
My high school had six classes of 30 students per year, which made for 1,080 students in total. It was a boys’-only school, placed right next door to an equally-sized girls’ school, so for neighbourhood traffic purposes there were about 2,000 students coming in every day.
Both schools were academically selective public magnet schools, so they drew students from all over Sydney (i.e. up to around 60km away) rather than just the local neighbourhood. The majority of students were Anglo-Australian, but there were also a lot of kids from immigrant backgrounds; my social group included Lebanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Greek kids.
Neither school had a cop on campus; the thought would have been dismissed as absurd if suggested. I don’t think that I ever saw a cop on school grounds in the six years I was there. The worst incidence of violence I recall was when one the school bullies got a moderately bad cut (not life threatening, but did require a few stitches) after one of his victims snapped and whacked him with a broken-off chair leg (there was a sharp bit where it had broken). The cut was probably accidental; I think he just meant to bruise him.
There were no significant traffic problems because pretty much 100% of the students came to school by public transport. Most on buses to the school (not designated school buses, just regular buses that happened to go past the school), with the more distant kids catching a train first.
The state government provided passes to all students that made this transport free, and the people running the buses included the expected student users in their schedule planning.
Obviously, this isn’t just about a difference in how the schools are run; it’s a society-wide sorta thing.
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That shit is really ridiculous, treating kids like that is beyond the pale. Threatening that they need to buy a browser extensions if their eyes wander too much, screaming in all-caps for paragraphs and “you know that I know who you are”, you simply can’t make that stuff up.
The science behind the software is probably non-existent, the effects will be racist and classist as hell, and the teachers are too stupid to figure that out and are playing along.
If that shit goes one for much longer, some people will suffer feel the after-effects of that for quite some time, probably their kids, too. Maybe reopening schools would create less damage to society in the long run?
If you asked Gramsci, he’d explain that hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the common sense values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Common sense helps that everything stays in its place, just like @Manqueman pointed out above. 
Or, to put it in a different way, our common sense here is fundamentally different from the common sense of most people out there.
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which is why i agreed with you about replacing police with welfare officers within the schools.
i agree, it does call back to the society in which it arises. please remember that my experiences are all in texas, usa where there are 1.5 cars per person, high-occupancy vehicle lanes could be used to nap on, and road rage is endemic. last year there were close to 1800 students at the high school where i teach and the traffic division of the school police issued 1000 student parking permits.
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And that is I stick to fantasy. Re reading Wheel of Time again, nice long vacation from this mess of a timeline.
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Seems from other posts that I may have been a bit optimistic that the inability to control oneself was mainly an elementary school thing.
That being said, a lot of the high school/college posts seem like teachers/professors freaking out about their loss of control.
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I was willing to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt that the student (perhaps because he was also sharing screen space with another boy that came over his house) was being indeed disruptive, but I’ll take it all back. I now remember that it only took one near-retirement narcissistic teacher in 5th grade that decided a quiet skinny gentle boy in class was a “mouth-breather” (yes, she called me that in front of all the students) to make me the scapegoat of all classroom disruptions for the whole year.
So yeah. It all probably went wrong FIRST because the two boys were black. And it went WORSE because whatever bureaucratic binder that said that any incident involving anything resembling a firearm had to get the SCHOOL COP involved.
There was that story a few years back where a kid was eating candy while doing homework on his school-issued laptop, and the school covertly activated the webcam to spy on him then accused him of taking drugs. IIRC he was white.
After checking, he was- and was it really 10 years ago?
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“A lot of head and eye movements” probably had something to do with this:
I’m sure these algorithms have a harder time tracking with black faces and eyes, and so register and record as if their heads are bouncing around all over the place like a bad runner app fooled by GPS echoes around tall buildings.
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Currently reading The Peripheral and that book’s idea of “the jackpot” definitely seems frighteningly realistic.
It’s a sort of slow-moving apocalypse that doesn’t have one root cause but is a combination of climate change, small wars, pandemics and other factors that reduce human population by 80% in about a 40 year period. The remaining people live in a technologically advanced kleptocracy.
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It doesn’t matter if the kid WAS being disruptive, this was not a situation that called for a police response.
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Ah, Trolloc invasions. They had it so good in The Two Rivers…
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“We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone”
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Zero tolerance in schools: educators that are too lazy to analyze, and too scared of making a mistake.
All cats aren’t gray in the night.
I think that’s educators who are too overworked and underpaid to do a job they were never supposed to be doing in the first place.
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Sort of like’s Chekhov’s Gun on the mantlepiece. If you have a school cop on campus, you’re going to bring him in a situation that really shouldn’t call for it (just to check things out). If you bring him in, he’s gonna do something that justifies him being there taking a salary.
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