BAD KID SCHOOL

Stupid School pt. II

I already wrote about Stupid School. Since then, more shit has come to light.

In the Stupid School metropolitan area, there are fewer and fewer kids to not educate. People with the money and resources to get out of the city and move to the suburbs are doing so. The outrageous cost of taxes and crime will be the burden of the broke. The rapid depopulation has left several school buildings only half-full. The cost of maintaining them didn’t make sense, so the schools consolidated into other bigger school buildings. The schools didn’t shut down. The school continues to exist but inside another school building. One building may have 3-4 schools inside of it. It’s like the teachers and students of another school lost their apartment and needed a place to stay, so the school with the bigger building is letting them flop on their couch.

Every big town has a school for the bad kids. You know which one I mean. Bad Kids School is where the city dumps the kids who got kicked out of every other school. A halfway house is where felons on probation are housed and supervised until they are ready to return to civilian life. Bad Kids School is the opposite. It’s where kids are housed and supervised until they commit a felony and a DA puts them into a prison.

Bad Kids School has been consolidated into Stupid School. Imagine closing down a maximum security prison and moving the serial rapist skinheads in with guys who are doing a short bit for not properly reporting their gambling income to the IRS. That’s the situation right now.

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Sometime in the 1990s, stories about child sex abuse by Catholic clergy came out so frequently and predictably, it was a joke. The scandal wasn’t that priests would diddle kids. Child rapists will always be drawn to jobs where they have access to kids, can earn the trust of kids’ parents, and have the authority to tell the kids what to do. The real scandal was the coverup. The church was burying evidence, handling it internally, and moving the rapist to a new parish with a new crop of kids to abuse.

Maybe the Church didn’t want the bad press. Maybe they believed they could correct the priest’s pedo-proclivities without involving law enforcement and the international press. As it turns out, Jesus ain’t a woodchipper, and Christendom provided no remedy. Effectively, the priests were punished with all-expenses-paid pedophile sex tourism.

The Stupid School District administrators are doing the same thing. Kids who are kicked out of other schools for criminal acts are not incarcerated. They are simply moved to a new school where no one knows who they are or what they did.

These kids are a distinct class of students. Every teacher knows who they are because the kids are searched for contraband every day. Normally, that would be the job of a school cop—euphemistically called “school resource officers™,” because admitting that you need cops at school is basically admitting your school sucks. Many schools got rid of their resource officers™ after 2020. Make of that what you will. Sometimes, the resource officer™ simply calls in sick. It often falls on teachers to frisk these kids.

You may have seen the consequences of these kinds of policies in Denver.

Teachers are not allowed to ask why the kid needs to be searched every day. They are not allowed to ask about what crimes this kid has committed. That would be a violation of the kid’s civil rights, you see. We are all assured that the kids' criminal behavior is the consequence of the psychological trauma they endured from early childhood. It’s not their fault they raped a classmate. These kids have a disability. It is confidential, medical information. The admins cannot reveal that information because it would be a HIPAA violation.

Amazingly, the strongest union in America can keep schools shut down for two years, but can’t gather the huevos to protect their dues-paying members from students.

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The school has active shooter drills regularly, so it seems absolutely insane to me that all but one outside door is locked every morning, and about 2,000 students are funneled in through one door. It’s like school admins are dues-paying members of the Dylan Klebold Fan Club.

There have been a handful of gun-related incidents at Stupid School. None ended in injury or fatality, thankfully. A couple kids were busted with heaters in their bags or in their cars. A kid from another school shot up the parking lot, but it was the middle of the day and no one was there except the kid they failed to assassinate.

There was a knife fight, too. But I didn’t get all the details on that. I don’t think anyone died.

There are fights in the halls and bathrooms, but the more civilized kids can control themselves long enough to organize a formal duel, to take place behind a grocery store a block away at lunch. The kids don’t bring pistols, thankfully, but they do bring witnesses. There are fights there almost every day, so kids who don’t know these kids or what their beef is will show up and watch it like a cockfight.

The kids are apparently free to do whatever they want. I know of one kid who decided they didn’t want to go on a field trip. They’d already been there before and it just sounded boring. They told their teacher, “Nah, I’m good.” And that was okay. The teachers and most of the other students went. Some kids stayed behind, with no supervision of any kind, left alone to do whatever they wanted for the rest of the day. The school didn't call the parents. Parents believed that their kids were at school, in the care of an adult professional.

A kid told me about prom, and how she accidentally walked in on a couple of her classmates fucking in a classroom.

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If you don’t turn something in, you get half credit. That’s 50% credit for 0% work. It is actually impossible to do worse than 50%.

Students who actually do their math homework universally get an A. Students don’t know if they are doing it correctly or not, because the teacher doesn’t mark any mistakes. When it’s time for finals, the few students who give a shit about academics are sweating bullets. They got As on all their assignments, but they don’t feel like they have a grasp of the material. They take the exam. They are certain they failed it. The grades come in. They got an A.

Then come the state exams, the ones used to track if kids are actually learning what they are supposed to be learning. The kids who got an A on every assignment and test have failed to meet the state minimum requirements. The kids who suspected that they didn’t know the material were right all along.

Many teachers aren’t even around for the final exams. It’s become a tradition for teachers to cash out their unused vacation days two weeks before school ends to get a headstart on their summer vacation. Let the subs proctor.

It’s not just math. It’s all of it. I know of one science teacher who doesn’t teach at all. His job is essentially to tell the kids which computerized lesson to run on their laptops. He’s still using software from the Covid lockdown. It’s a make-do tool for kids who weren’t allowed to go to school. But damn, it sure makes the teacher’s job a whole lot easier. This must be that “new normal” I kept hearing about.

Kids are flunking state exams. The state has the data. The state knows that the kids aren’t learning. They also know that every kid is a straight-A honor student. They know that the schools are just a mill to forge education credentials.

Right now, colleges are getting crops of applications from straight-A honors students who scored 13 on the ACT.

Oh. But don’t worry. That’s not going to be a problem.

Schools are deeply concerned with fairness, you see.

And they are happy to take non-dischargeable federal loan money.