Annual opting out fun

[EFmom]

It's my week to tick off the principal. She's a nice person and largely does a good job, but it seems to be my responsibility to annoy her.

We opt the kids out of the D.A.R.E. program. The program legally is supposed to be an opt-in, but the school ignores this starts right in on all the kids without notifying the parents. Our opting our kids out means that she needs to come up with something else to do with them. She tries to make it my problem, but my take on it is that because she is required to get permission for them to take it, she should be well aware and prepared for parents to not give permission. We did that number last week.

This week's issue is the Pledge of Allegiance. We don't say it. My fifth grader told me her current teacher is making her stand for it. So very not legal.

So, this morning dh (a public school teacher) called to remind her that a teacher cannot force a child to say the pledge or stand during it. The principal was completely unaware that children cannot be coerced into saying the pledge. What do they teach them at administrator school?

Then she tried to say that the teacher was OK because she was just making dd stand, not forcing her to recite.

So, I dug up the cases for her demonstrating that she cannot force dd to stand during the pledge, and found that the relevant case occured in our very school district. Maybe it's time for a little local history lesson.

I wish I could see her face when she reads that tomorrow!

[Emmeline II]

Well, an advantage to being "that" parent is that in the future they may concede immediately to get the discussion over with .

[LauraLoo]

Originally Posted by Emmeline II

Well, an advantage to being "that" parent is that in the future they may concede immediately to get the discussion over with .

I am currently involved with a situation at our school where our principal was unaware of state education legislation that was passed about 9 years ago. It appears as if they not in compliance and the issue has been escalated to our superintendent who is researching the matter. The principal is brand new to our district, but not to our state. We've only been in session for less than two weeks and I'm sure I've already been branded "that" parent. The principal did say that it often takes parents to make needed change within a school. So, you go EFmom!

[EFmom]

I take a perverse pleasure in being "that" parent. I've been down the road with the D.A.R.E. thing before with the older child, so the principal should have seen it coming.

The poor woman. She's always trying to defend the indefensible.

[journeymom]

Talk to me about the DARE program. What do you object to? I vaguely remember it was introduced when I was in high school, but I don't remember much else.

Ds's school has 'red ribbon' week every year. Is this related?

[Linda on the move]

Why can't your child just go to the libary and read a book? I don't really see what the big is about for you or the principal.

I let my Dd decide about the DARE program. We talked about and discussed the content as it went along, but I trust to her make her own choices about things and be able to listen to different view points and figure things out.

[EFmom]

I would have no problem letting her go to the library to read a book. That's what I suggested to the principal the last time around. However, I guess the librarian objects because they wouldn't go for it.

[aslyn]

We have not had the pleasure of opting out of the dare program just yet I really have no problem with the kids hearing drugs are bad..I've told em that myself..but I question the effectiveness of the whole thing. I know quite a few people who after being exposed to DARE and getting awards etc go on to have really bad drug problems. My cousin had a huge problem with crack, and another friend with crystal meth. My friend with the crystal meth problem turned his aunt in to the DARE people for smoking..cigarettes Also 90% of people I went to school with and know today smoke mj..I don't but thats my choice, not because someone told me my brain cells were going to be fried.

I imagine we will opt out when the time comes, I'd rather educate them about drugs in our own way.

[JD5351]

My friend Dan used to wear his DARE shirt while getting high.

I always hated DARE days..We had it in 5th grade. I hated the stupid workbooks that made it seem like EVERYONE was out to get us to do drugs. And I hated the lame role plays. I don't remember my mom having to give permission either. Maybe it wasn't required at that time? Or they just ignored it as well.

[EFmom]

Originally Posted by journeymom

Talk to me about the DARE program. What do you object to? I vaguely remember it was introduced when I was in high school, but I don't remember much else.

Ds's school has 'red ribbon' week every year. Is this related?

I don't know about "red ribbon."

My objections to the DARE program are legion.

The DARE program, at best, is completely ineffective in deterring kids from using drugs. Independently funded, peer reviewed studies have come to this conclusion over and over. See http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03172r.pdf for a report from the Goverment Accounting Office, that hotbed of progressive thinking , that acknowledged the ineffectiveness of the program. DARE itself has funded studies about its effectiveness, but has squelched the results that don't show what it wants.

In some specific situations, the DARE program has been found to increase drug use.

DARE constitutes practicing psychiatric treatment on children. I don't want the schools or the police in that role. A 2007 peer reviewed article in Perspectives on Psychological Science lists DARE as a program with the potential to harm clients.

There is an opportunity cost to both students and police. Children could be using the time squandered on DARE to actually learn something. If the schools had a math curriculum that was demonstrated to result in no actual math being learned, I doubt they would continue it. As a tax payer in the community, I am already paying the salaries of certified teachers. I don't think it is a productive use of tax payer resources to pay for a police officer to teach an ineffective program when he or she could be doing something to actually make the community safer.

When confronted with the evidence that DARE is ineffective, the organization responds in two ways. First, it claims that it is always revising itself, therefore no one can evaluate it accurately. That is just nonsense. Second, it says that even if it doesn't deter drug use, there are the warm, fuzzy feelings it generates in children about police. Again, if a math curriculum didn't teach math, I doubt we'd keep it in the schools because it made kids like math teachers more.

Every school newsletter that we get home talks about the schools using "evidence based practices." If that were actually true, DARE would be gone yesterday.

People being afraid to confront schools about this kind of stuff is the only real reason why it has lingered for so long.

[journeymom]

Holy cow! I found this on Wiki,

Nine-year-old Darrin Davis of Douglasville, Ga., called 911 after he found a small amount of speed hidden in his parent's bedroom because, as he told the Dallas Morning News, "At school, they told us that if we ever see drugs, call 911 because people who use drugs need help . . . . I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They never said they would arrest them. . . . But in court, I heard them tell the judge that I wanted my mom and dad arrested. That is a lie. I did not tell them that." The arrest wrecked his parents' lives, said the Dallas newspaper; both parents lost their jobs, a bank threatened to foreclose on their homes and his father was kept in jail for three months "

Thats shocking.

[EFmom]

So dh's brother was a student at the high school when the court case that established that kids cannot beforced to stand during the pledge was litigated. It was a couple of years before dh and I went through the same school, which is in the same district that's giving dd a hard time about sitting through the pledge.

BIL emailed me a very funny story about the school climate at the time. The short version is that some kid stole every flag out of every classroom as a senior prank, probably because the court case was in the back of everyone's mind.

For the next several weeks, the teachers made all the kids stand and say the Pledge to the discolored rectangle on the wall where the flag would have been if it hadn't been stolen.