Ruckus at Smiling Pizza?

Carmen wrote: [quote=Drano][quote=Carmen]Just to chime in, I'm from NC and I once saw a chick throw another girl down a flight of concrete outdoor steps and then literally curb-stomp her, breaking her jaw and half of her face at lunchtime on my highschool campus. This was about 10 years ago.

So, ya know, violence happens everywhere. We were not allowed to have cell phones, ftr...

Wow. I gotta tell you, if somebody did that to my kid I wouldn't rest until they were dead. I'd probably take out the parents too, seeing as I'd be headed for the can.

Fights were pretty chronic in my high school, but they were relatively mundane affairs of the punchpunch bleedbleed variety where everyone was (usually) friends afterward. And hanging around in town making an ass out of yourself was pretty much out of the question when everybody knew where you lived.

I grew up going to a pretty low-income school, we had a lot of "gang" affiliated fights (I put it in quotes because none of them were really affiliated with gangs, they kind of used that excuse to beat the shit out of eachother.) It was not unusual for kids to be taken away from fights in ambulances and a few kids had been beaten with weapons by the time I graduated (baseball bats, one kid stabbed another with some of the tools from the bio lab, etc.)
We didn't have metal detectors which I thought was weird. the school was really overcrowded, constructed for a capacity of 1500 and, when I graduated, we had over 2700 students there in no less than 11 trailers. When the bell rang the halls were so packed even I felt like stabbing someone...a lot of the fights I saw were a result of someone bumping into someone else in the hall and then it just escalated from there. Angry, poor kids confined to a prison-like cell of a school carrying 60 lbs worth of books because we had no lockers seems to logically result in a bit of tension.

dont get me started on the metal detectors they were worthless. i always get stop cause of pack of gum in my pants all the time.

if i really wanted to smuggle stuff there was a side entrance, where i could of enter to get anything in. which i have let friends in when they were cutting school.

only reason to get into the front way was to get my attendance taken.

Flexichick wrote: Stacey with the vaseline on the face - you're gansta!

LOL - I am sooo glad those days are over for me

nowadays this is how I roll:

I feel sorry for the nice kids that go to John Jay who must be scared to death every day.

This thread just makes me thankful that I have no kids who are negotiating going to school in PS now.

When my 30ish kids went to school in the hood it was a gentler time. I have one son who landed up in John Jay, when it was John Jay and his experience there was a disaster. He dropped out in his junior year, later went on the get a ged and then went on to become a teacher for the Board of Ed. He is 35 and has two masters and is an excellent teacher and probably on his way to becoming a principal.

But... that is the end of the story. At the time I was not in fear of him getting attacked on 7th ave. I don't know if that was because he was the kind of kid who would avoid those circumstances ( leave the building and cut down 5th street away from possibilities) or what.

It is t horrific to think after the reconstruction of that high school that the situation seems even worse near 20 years later.

Carmen wrote: Just to chime in, I'm from NC and I once saw a chick throw another girl down a flight of concrete outdoor steps and then literally curb-stomp her, breaking her jaw and half of her face at lunchtime on my highschool campus. This was about 10 years ago.

So, ya know, violence happens everywhere. We were not allowed to have cell phones, ftr...

Were high schools even addressing cell phones ten years ago? Back then I thought it was still beepers... "143" "411", heheh...

Jamzer wrote: This thread is depressing me. I fear for my kids.

Try and get them into a Charter school which is by far a better education. Either that or Catholic/private route. Stay away from public schools and the crooked teachers unions. The US is 27th out of 30 in the world for Science and Math. The UFT thinks the answer is more money, which it's not. Each kid in NYC gets 15K and still they complain it's not enough and our kids are failing miserably. Sad there is a cap on the no. of Charter schools allowed. Something proven to work is penalized. I heard someone say on a show how well merit pay for teachers work, there was a school in Little Rock that was doing this that had great success. I believe they said it's discontinued, the unions don't believe in merit pay for teachers. It also works in other countries like Japan for example.

Charter schools have strict accountability where public schools do not. Charter schools, who have only been around here since 1999, have better results than public schools according to test results. After a decade, charter schools have proven themselves. Unfortunately, there is not enough to meet the demand of parents and second the state needs to finance these schools. Why deny something that's successful. UFT that's why. Instead of trying to stop charter schools, we should be celebrating them. Give kids a choice.

My kids graduated from Midwood High School (huge, terribly overcrowded, but nevertheless excellent public high school in Brooklyn) 8 and 12 years ago respectively. Both managed to go on through college and find productive careers, in spite of the supposed horrors of public education.

Conventional public schools can be excellent, if the majority of students at such schools are sufficiently motivated.

Just to give a little outside perspective...

I moved here with four kids in school from AZ two years ago. In AZ we struggled to find the best schools, private, public and charter to put them in. AZ is regularly in the bottom five for education. Second from the bottom this year, I think. NY is normally in the top ten.

The move was a big mess, and the plan to find a great school was lost in the shuffle and they just went to their zoned ones. The education they are getting there easily tops the ones they got at AZ's "best".

We were told that kids coming from the west would often find themselves behind out here, and that was the case for us. The first year was a bit of catch up, especially for the middle school kids.

Beyond the standard three R's, opportunities out here that they didn't have in AZ include frequent field trips and projects for the primary kids, and specialty classes like art and drama in addition to many projects and papers for the middle school kids.

Give me a few more years for the newness to wear off, and maybe I can summon the proper level of distaste, but for now I'm impressed.

But then I'm from the west, so WTF do I know?