Five students in Galesburg, Ill. were denied their high school diplomas because their families cheered too loudly during graduation. It had been a problem before so the school board required the graduating seniors and their parents to sign a good behavior contract. Not everyone kept their part of the bargain and so their kid's diploma is being held hostage. Want the whole story? Click here.
Talk amongst yourselves.
(Skinny Wife gets the happy-gram for the tip.)
Talk amongst yourselves.
(Skinny Wife gets the happy-gram for the tip.)
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8 comments:
Perhaps it is my hillbilly upbringing but this just seems so absurd to me. Graduation is a time for a little bit of hoopin’ and hollerin’; epecially when so many struggle to graduate. Do people not realize that so many students really struggle to make it? It is a tremendous achievement. Where I come from we always had air horns at Commencement, ball games, etc. When my husband graduates you can bet I am going to clap and cheer (but I will leave my air horn at home).
I think it is sad that these students won’t get their diploma over something that they had no control over. It would be one thing if the student did something unreasonable but these were guests that broke the (silly) rule. I just think sometimes we take ourselves way too seriously, we need to celebrate life a little more. Hey…if they provided real time captioning at the graduation we could hoop and holler through the whole ceremony J Now that would be a very fun, UD Commencement!
Ms. Fat Jack
It's not your hillbilly upbringing, Ms. Fat Jack. It's just another power tactic schools these days are using. It's the schools taking themselves too seriously, not us. Everybody wants to put a rule or regulation on everything.
BUT...if we don't place rules and regulations on everything, won't the terrorists follow us home?
Just to play devil's advocate, what of the fact that the parents signed a contract and knew about this ahead of time? Shouldn't they have known better?
The crowd has, afterall, gotten so out of control that they had fist fights the year before because folks yelled so much that you couldn't hear the next student's name being called. Doesn't that infringe on the rights of the other students?
How do you feel about using police to remove routy parents and family?
I think academics have gotten stuffy and forgotten a few things about the kids they are there to teach. First, perhaps some of these kids are the first to graduate from their families. Their parents may never have attended a graduation. I'm sure in that case they would be very excited, and also possibly unaware of what constitutes "too much" of a disturbance. If a kid's family did yell too much, the kid was probably already embarrassed enough and needed to extra punishment.
Also, why must the kid, rather than the people who yelled, complete the community service, if anyone must complete it at all?
Finally, can they prove it was the kid's family who yelled? What if someone wanted to play a prank on a kids who was graduating (as kids will be prone to do) and a bunch of people yelled? How unfair is it to punish the kid?
While I believe in preserving the dignity of the moment, this seems to have gone too far.
What kind of lesson is a child to learn from this nonsensical, authoritarian response? That even if he performs his duties in excellence every day for four long years, it can be negated in the space of five minutes, by the actions of others over which he has no control?
What power does the graduating student have that the school administrators do not have to control the crowd? The ACLU spokesman should remember that the school's ability to control the "decorum" at an event does not extend further than the boundaries of each individual's civil rights. That means the school must confine their actions to the persons that are in violation of the rules, and does not somehow magically transfer individual responsibility for someone else's actions to the student they cheer for.
Apply that skewed logic to other situations, and it quickly becomes clear just how idiotic the school's position is.
For example, at the next school board meeting, the superintendent rises to give a short speech. Every time he makes a good point, three citizens in the back of the room cheer and whistle loudly. So the local policeman in attendance grabs the superintendent by the arm and escorts him out of the building for disrupting the meeting.
Does that sound at all sensible to anyone with a pulse and the mental capacity of an eight year-old?
Or imagine what would happen at the next presidential debate in which the moderator, having asked the audience to hold its applause until the end of the debate, expelled one of the candidates because the crowd cheered at an especially good one-liner. The moderator would be considered extremely fortunate if he managed to avoid tar and feathering!
The bottom line is that most of the young people graduating are over 18, and considered adults with the full compliment of rights belonging to adults, in the eyes of the law. The school administrators, being accustomed to imposing their arbitrary will on children who are not considered to be endowed with the full set of rights that comes with adulthood, are showing just how arbitrary that power can be when it is wielded by authoritarians without conscience. They might get away with it in the classroom where children are subject to that arbitrary power, but the adults that walk across the stage, having earned the right to their diplomas, have also earned the right to never again be subject to the whim of arbitrary power.
They should exercise that right, and demand that they receive the diplomas they have earned, teaching the "educators" a lesson in the personal humility endemic to a free society.
I'm really not a fan of "stupid rules," but I can see a point behind this. Yes, some of these students may be the first to graduate from their families. But so might the person who is next in line to receive his/her diploma. And because of the whooping and hollering, THAT person's family is denied the chance to hear their graduate's name be called. Unless there is a pause until things calm down (which people would also bitch about), the polite thing to do is wait until all diplomas are awarded.
I was not present at my nephew's graduation from a large high school in the midwest, but I watched (or tried to watch) the video. The noise level made it impossible to hear over half of the names being called. We're not talking about brief applause or yells of "yeah, Bobby!" This was sustained noisemaking. And I'd have no problems with the school coming down on the people who do this. Yes, it's tough on this year's students, but maybe the next year, people will behave better.
I saw this again this a.m. on CNN. Seems it's the story that won't go away. I had so much more to stay I had to add a few lines on my blog, with a shout-out to Fat Jack, of course.
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