If ever there were a terrific argument for why parents should be allowed to transfer their children to charter schools, this would be it: an inter-city Pittsburgh high school has been forced to temporarily ban forks because students reportedly kept attacking each other with them.
“Superintendent Frank Dalmas said the reason behind the ‘no fork’ policy is that students were using them to stab each other,” reported local news station WPXI. “He said there will be no forks or knives until students stop using them on each other.”
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Can you really blame him or other officials for instituting this policy? I surely cannot, though parents and students alike feel differently about both this ban and other “extreme” measures that have recently been enacted to keep students safe.
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“They are taking the kids’ utensils from them for lunch, tell them to eat with their fingers and they are not allowed to use bathrooms,” complained one parent. “It’s just ridiculous.”
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The parent neglected to mention that local authorities have been called to Sto-Rox High School almost daily due to student fights and drug use in the bathrooms.
The situation at this school is clearly out of control, and while the rules implemented by officials are admittedly a bit draconian, it should be noted that there is a precedent.
According to The Daily Caller, after a gunman shot a student outside the school last April, teachers “criticized the administrative response to the shooting, observing that there was no district-wide lockdown and that children at a nearby elementary school were released to traipse into school buses while police actively cased the area for the shooter.”
Because the school flubbed its previous response, I guess it now wants to make up for its past errors by banning forks, knives, and whatever else. Okay then …
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Read More:
EAGNews: School bans forks after students won’t stop stabbing each other during lunch
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Sto-Rox teachers critical of district’s emergency response to shooting
WTAE: Sto-Rox High School student shot at dismissal timeAdvertisement - story continues below
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The key lesson I personally have drawn from this story is that school choice would be exceptionally beneficial for not only all American parents and schoolchildren, but especially so for those from this particular community.
Imagine if the flustered parents of this failing school could simply simply their kids out of it and put them into an upscale charter school where kids are too busy learning — and learning their learning — to stab each other with forks or whatever else.
The good news is that this may soon be a possibility, courtesy of newly confirmed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
