In the past few months we’ve had some highly-publicized instances of college students being tasered by security guards at colleges.
Now reports are surfacing of problems at high schools as well — the latest one actually ending in the arrest of the high school principal who stuck up for his student. The New York Sun:
The arrest of a high school principal is triggering a dispute between principals and police-appointed security officers on the issue of who has authority over school discipline.
The principal, Mark Federman, was arrested Tuesday after protesting the treatment of one of his students. School safety agents arrested the student after she resisted an attempt to prevent her from entering her school before the official start time, allegedly punching an agent.
Mr. Federman interfered, in an attempt to prevent the student from being made a spectacle of, the president of the city principals’ union, Ernest Logan, said yesterday. The school safety agents were about to escort her through the front door in front of a crowd of students. After a scuffle, Mr. Federman and the two safety agents were treated for minor injuries at a hospital.
The executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Donna Lieberman, defended Mr. Federman, saying he was “trying to protect a student,” and Mr. Logan said the incident echoed concerns of principals across the city who are clashing with safety agents.
“These are schools; these are not prisons,” Mr. Logan said. “We need to move away from the criminalization of young people in this city.”
The safety officers’ camp has replied:
The union that represents school safety officers, Teamsters Local 237, quickly fired back.
“Safety agents have been wrongfully accused of criminalizing the schools, but they are the ones being treated like criminals,” the union’s president, Greg Floyd, said, holding up a picture of a tuft of hair he said the student had ripped from one safety officer’s head.
What is certain is that there seems to be a lower threshold now for violent and rebellious behavior — whether coming from the students, safety officers or security guards. Confrontation seems the order of the day. Who makes the call on whether to move on a student (whether at a college of a high school)? And what are the criteria officers at learning institutions use to decide to move in?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.