Suspended Cell Phone Student’s Behavior Deserving of an F
By now you’ve all heard the story. A young student (Kevin Francois) is talking to his mom on the cell phone. She’s a sergeant currently serving in Iraq. He’s a junior in a school that has banned cell usage during the school day. A teacher walks up while he’s on the phone and tells him to turn it off. Being the loving son he is, he refuses and is awarded with a 10-day suspension.
The airwaves light up with indignation. Media circus erupts at the callousness of the school administration. Kid is an innocent victim. School officials are the bad guys. The school is bombarded with calls and emails threatening them for being so cold hearted. Kevin becomes a poster child of a loving patriotic son done in by heartless school administrators.
Yeah right.
Let’s get this straight. The kid knowingly broke the school rules (and if you look at his GPA it doesn’t look like he’s a first time offender). He cussed out the teacher and it took two assistant principals to get him to stop using profanity.
This could have been avoided so many ways. The kid could have simply told his Mom that he’d need to talk to her before/after school. He could have handed the phone to the teacher so the Mom could explain she was in Iraq and really wanted to talk to him now. He could have hung up and asked for an exception on future calls, which the school was evidently willing to work out if she called through the school. He could have said goodbye, hung up, and then had the moral high groud if it became an issue. But no, he had to shift into 4-letter world and for that the media is painting him as a hero and school officials as villains. Tip to the kid, school is about preparing you for the real world and if you are so wound up that you lose it everytime you think you are wronged then your chances of making it are about nil.
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May 12th, 2005 at 10:09 am
Ahh, the Sins of Ommission(tm). Informed Sources said:”[the] teacher walks up while he’s on the phone and tells him to turn it off. …he refuses and is awarded with a 10-day suspension.”
Convenient partial truths: the teacher told boy to hang up, boy told the teacher who was on the phone, explaining the reason for refusal. Teacher then attempts to grab the phone from his hand. At that point –physical agression by the school, a legal assault– profanity should be expected. Be grateful he doesn’t prosecute the criminal charge.
IS said “[T]he school is bombarded with calls and emails threatening them”
Not true. Lots of condemnations, not one threat. More rhetorical garbage. Well-deserved criticism is not ‘threats’.
It’s correct that there were –in retrospect– many other options that would have settled this incident. The teacher could have asked to speak to, (verify) Kevin’s Mom; not assault him. The secretary could have let him keep the phone instead of taking it away. The school could have acknowleged the truth that it was Kevin’s mother (verified) instead of trying to claim otherwise. In this post, with plenty of time for retrospect, the whole truth still isn’t told.
No, what we have here is an administration that went lockstep in mindlessly enforcing an arbitrary rule. Shame on them and shame on ‘Informed Sources’. Hooray for the commonsense public’s common sense.
PS - So what about his GPA? You really want to go there? Is it just a insinuated slur, or does this school regularly break the rules for the (high GPA) teachers’ pets?
May 13th, 2005 at 7:13 am
This story isn’t going away so I posted our response to subpatre as a new posting here.