Parents Threatened With Arrest For Walking Their Children To School (Video)

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RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE Alicja Pietrucha (R) and her mother Ilona are seen on their way to primary school on June 14, 2013 Kuligow, Poland. AFP PHOTO/JANEK SKARZYNSKI (Photo credit should read JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

“She’s threatening to arrest people,” says Wendy Jarman about principal, Holly Ray.

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Think About Now reports:

Imagine walking your child to school and suddenly an officer tells you that you’re trespassing and need to get off the premises. That’s the policy that Bear Branch Elementary School is implementing against parents. The tactic, according the original report by FOX 26, is to prevent parents who live close to the school from walking onto school grounds.

Thankfully, some parents with means are already choosing to remove their children due to the policy, but the principal has decided that he’s not going to back down. Apparently, no matter how close a child is to the school, the child either has to take a bus or wait in a long car pickup/drop off line. If you attempt to even walk your child off the campus, you could face criminal charges.

From Fox 26

“She’s threatening to arrest people,” says Wendy Jarman about principal, Holly Ray.

Jarman pulled her children out of the school Monday and placed them in private school. She lives in the neighborhood behind the school. Her kids were walkers who she escorted, but they can’t do that anymore.

Ray won’t allow it. Ray has gotten Montgomery County Constables to be her enforcers.

“This has happened to many parents,” Jarman says. “They have been cited. They have been threatened, if they step one foot on school property, they will be arrested and charged with who knows what.”

Frank Young has one of those warnings. He also lives close to the school and he also pulled his children out of it. Young says no effort to negotiate a better policy or even hundreds of signatures on a petition got the district to change the policy or bully tactics.

“Mrs. Ray’s policy is implying that a parent doesn’t have the ability or capability to decide what is safest for her children and that the school district does,” Young says. “I disagree.”

The school district responded to our request for comment with a statement fully supporting Principal Ray, saying the goal is a safe dismissal process.

But parents who have been coming to the school for years say there was nothing unsafe about the old pickup and drop off procedures. They say this is simply a principal overstepping her boundaries.

Young says some parents are just going along with the principal to keep peace, but he says not speaking up allows a poisonous environment to fester.

“The most toxic thing we can do for our kids is not fight for truth and justice,” Young says.”

Any rational person would state that Young is correct, but I don’t think she’s going far enough. One of the saddest aspects of American society is how little time parents are able to spend with their children. A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children. Walking a child to school may be the only time spent with their child outside the confines of stressful car rides, or away from their phones and computers. Seeing as three-quarters of children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates, regulations like these make the parent child relationship even worse.

Many of these issues would go away if not for the true problem in this situation, which is public education. If you’re out to fight for truth and justice, how about admitting that public school is more about indoctrination than about education? As Peter Gray, author of numerous books on childhood education, put it:

“Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It’s not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age.”

“Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.”

Even if you still believe that public educations is of merit, the actions done by this school are hard to justify. In part because it’s now safer than it’s been in 40 years for a child to be outside.

The FBI has several decades of data on missing persons now, and those numbers show that the number of missing person reports involving minors has been at record low levels in recent years. Overall, the number of these reports have fallen by 40 percent since 1997. This is more impressive when you consider that the overall U.S. population has risen by 30 percent over that same time period, meaning that the actual rate of missing person reports for children has fallen faster than 40 percent.

Photo:  Bing

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