The Inclusion of Criminals

Problem 2: Inclusion - the criminals

At the beginning of the year, I had to sign paperwork saying that I was aware of the felon-offender status of one of my students.

S/he was recently arrested for possession of a controlled substance on school grounds.

Why is this child still in school?

Why should the taxpayers of Fayette County, of Kentucky, have to foot the bill for a student who clearly wants no part of an education?

Worse still, why do the parents of the other students at my school have to send their sons and daughters to school with a student who should be in jail?

The answer is horrifying. A Fayette County judge decided that this student needed to be in school more than S/he needed to be in jail. This judge sacrificed the quality of education for the many for what S/he saw as the needs of one student.

In what looking-glass universe does this thinking make sense?

There comes a point when we must separate the wheat from the chaff. Forcing convicted felons to return to public school is an atrocity. It is a slap in the face to the students who come to school and try to learn. It is a slap in the face to the parents of hard-working students when judges put convicted felons in the same classrooms with their sons and daughters.

Students who don't want to be educated should not be in the public school system. They tax the system's resources, exhaust teachers and administrators, and cripple the education of every other student in the building - not to mention creating an unsafe environment for teachers and other students.

A free public education should be the right of every American, BUT, that right should be forfeit when students commit felonies.

That right should be forfeit when the student doesn't want it.

That right should be forfeit when a student disrupts the entire educational process out of spite.

Still, the idea of inclusion persists as some noble dream. Our refusal to exclude anyone from public education, no matter how awful or destructive, no matter how spiteful or abusive, no matter how many criminal convictions will be our undoing.

We can't save everyone, because everyone doesn't want to be saved.

Some of our students don't want to go to college or learn a trade or become productive members of our society. Some of them want to do drugs, sell drugs, and sleep the rest of the time.

These students want to exist outside the boundaries of decent human behavior, and we should let them - BUT NOT IN OUR SCHOOLS.