In case you missed it, it seems the case brought by Savana Redding against her school for strip-searching her when she was 13 is going to be heard by the Supreme Court. If you have
an aversion to horrifying invasions of privacy, please don’t read the following:
An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.
The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”
This was, apparently, all done in the name of “Zero Tolerance,” perhaps the stupidest goddamned idea in education since “No Child Left Behind.” What I don’t understand about this is manyfold:
1. How can you perpetrate searches like this, then send a teen off to history class, where they will learn that the U.S. is unique amongst the world’s nations for its intolerance of unreasonable search and seizure?
2. When did we devolve into a society so terrified of drugs that searching in a child’s vagina for Advil became de rigeur?
3. What exactly would they have done for “punishment” had they found said drugs? Suspension? How would it be seen as a negative for the girl if she had to go home, and away from the hands of humiliation that had just scoured her every orifice?
4. Supreme Court? This had to go to the Supreme Court??? This sounds like a goddamned easy call to me. Then again, I’m one of those bed-wetting hippie feminazis who’s against child molestation.
Here in Wisconsin, they charged a high school girl with disorderly conduct for not relinquishing her cell phone during class after a teacher asked her numerous times to stop texting. The fine carries a 295$ fine with it.
The girl, when the cops were called in, denied having a cell phone. They made her wait until a female officer could arrive and search the girl. The phone was found in the ass crack of the girl. She had stuffed it down her pants rather than give it over to the authorities.
Now, this is interesting. Part of me likes the idea of busting the little brats for thinking their text messaging is more important than my scintillating lectures (if scatterbrained and sarcastic is one’s idea of scintillating). But a larger part of me does not like the precedent that could be set from this case.
Are teachers so impotent in their classrooms that they have to resort to calling the cops? And are cell phones so sacred as to be hidden in orifices rather than turned over?
While I agree that materialism is way too rampant in youth culture, I gotta say that, if anyone ever forcibly extricated anything from daughter’s orifice (regardless of whether or not she was being annoying in class), I’m burning that school to the ground and plucking out the extricators’ fingernails.
I rarely agree with feminazis (self proclaimed even)
But ya got me here.
Zero tolerance = zero thought.
Eep, I’m not a feminazi in the slightest. I always forget people can’t read my sarcastic sneer.
I struggle with the situation here in the US with our schools. Half the time I think the schools are fascist and asinine; the other half of the time I think parents want their cakes and to eat it too. In the Wisconsin case, I don’t feel bad for anyone. I can’t imagine having so little control over my class that I would be forced to call the cops to deal with a texting student. Then again, I’m assuming some lawsuit happened not too long ago that hamstrung the school and the teacher. But I don’t feel sorry for the girl, either, because all she had to do was put the phone down for 50 minutes or less. No sympathy for a kid who can’t do that.