[News] $5 Fine for chewing gum? Parents, students protest discipline policy

quote Sylvia Wood, msnbc.com

A charter school network in Chicago praised by Mayor Rahm Emanuel for its academic performance is under fire from parents and advocates for charging students $5 for some disciplinary infractions, including chewing gum, violating the dress code or being more than three minutes late to class.
The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which operates 10 high schools in the city, said it collected nearly $200,000 in discipline fees last year as part of a policy that asks misbehaving high school students to share in the cost of addressing the misbehavior. The money is then used by the school to offset the costs of teachers or staff who stay after school to administer detention.
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“The goal is to promote positive behavior by staff and students and produce a learning environment that is conducive to learning and college preparation,” Michael Milkie, CEO and superintendent of Noble, said in a statement.
Emanuel, former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama, has drawn criticisim from the Chicago Teachers Union for his open support of charter schools, including Noble, whose teachers are mostly not unionzed.

Some education advocates say Noble's approach to discipline is counterproductive and another burden for poor families who are already struggling to get by. Students who accumulate a certain number of demerit points over a two-week period are then sent to detention, for which they must pay a $5 fee.
“We think the discipline system is ridiculously petty,” Julie Woestehoff, the executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, told msnbc.com on Tuesday.
Students and parents marched to City Hall on Monday to protest the discipline policy, which Woestehoff said is unnecessarily harsh.

“We’ve talked to a lot of parents who have taken their kids out of Noble,” she told msnbc.com.
Donna Moore, a parents of a student at Noble school called the policy a “hidden tax on Chicago’s black and Latino families." “Noble is forcing low-income parents to choose between paying the rent and keeping their child in school,” she said. Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, offer students an alternative to the traditional public school system. They are increasingly popular in urban areas with high numbers of economically disadvantaged and struggling students.

Noble, founded by former Chicago public high school teachers, has a waiting list of 3,000 students wanting to enroll.“We believe the fact that we had more than 8,000 applications for our incoming freshmen classes and long waiting lists for all our other classes demonstrates that families desperately want this safe, productive learning environment for their children,” Milkie said.
He told msnbc.com on Tuesday that the discipline policy provides a "safe, learning enviroment," for Noble's 6,500 students. Students who earn four demerits within a two-week period receive a three-hour detention and the $5 fine. Students with more than 12 detentions are referred to a class at a cost of $140. Accommodations are made for families who can't pay.
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"We sweat the small stuff," Milkie said. "We think these are life skills that will help students."
School administrators across the country use a variety of discipline policies to try to encourage good behavior among their students.

“We have an incentive-based system,” Steve Mancini, director of public affairs for KIPP, a charter network of 109 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C., told msnbc.com.
Many of the middle schools offer students ways to earn KIPP dollars, a school-based currency, for academic performance, conduct and overall behavior. That “money” can be turned in at the school store for school supplies, he said.

But Mancini told msnbc.com that the reward system gets phased out in the higher grades as the students learn the “intrinsic reward” of school success.“We want them to develop a love of learning for learning’s sake,” he said.Kimberly Davis told the Chicago Tribune that the Noble discipline policy works. She said her daughter is on track to graduate high school, after paying more than $300 for behavior classes and discipline fees.“You have to buy into the program,” Davis told the newspaper, adding that for her daughter, “it worked.”

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I've been on a No Bullshit campaign for a while. I saw this a few minutes ago and though, you give your kids money for chewing gum but you're bitching about a $5 fine if they chew it and break the rules? If they're so poor why waste money on gum?

Sorry for the weird formatting. I didn't see a printable version of the article.

I went to a charter school for middle school and there was a comparable system. Basically you were allowed to have up to 8 missing or late assignments for the quarter, or be late to class 3 times, or have less than 3 dress code violations. At the end of every quarter, we had some kind of fun event like going bowling for an entire school day, and you were only allowed to go if you had less than those numbers of violations. Anyone who didn't go was stuck staying at school in detention, and if you didn't show up and didn't have a doctor's note or equally reasonable excuse for why you got detention for another week.

Honestly, I think people are more up-in-arms about the $5 charge than the principle of the matter. If that $5 is a stretch or you just don't want to pay it, tell your kids that if they get detention they're also grounded. Make your kids behave and you don't have to pay for it, it's that simple.

quote oliveoil

I think it's fair.. idk.. I never found why it was so hard for people to follow easy rules. And gum gets everywhere honestly. I hated walking around school and I'd step in gum. So I don't think a $5 fine is a big deal..

Yeah, really. When I was at school people used to stick their used gum to the underside of desks. If you were sitting at one of them and accidentally moved your knees up it'd often go on your clothes or whatever. It was so freakin' gross.

People who were given after-school detentions in my HS for gum violations often were given gloves and a spatula and told to scrape gum off of desks for an hour or so. Old fashioned, but I think it got the point across. I don't really like the concept of fining kids. Back then our recess time or time after school, for me and my friends at least, was the most important thing. Having it wasted doing crappy jobs like scraping gum impacted us harder than a fine and/or brief detention period would have.

quote Scarchelli

"Accommodations will be made for those who can't pay." Yeah, as if those families can't pay." Bullshit if you ask me; and the fine should be $500, because kids don't know how to chew gum and throw it away like humans.

And will it end up being the kids or the parents that feel the pain of losing that money? If it's the parents then it's a case of someone else getting the punishment from the person who did it. It's all very well for the school to give out fines of $140 for a detention and $5 for chewing gum, but in the end if it's only the parents paying and not the students then it's not going to do anything besides get the parents to discuss with the child about it. A fine shouldn't be needed just to get the child to be told to behave. If the child feels the pain of losing that money it might do something, but otherwise its just another surcharge

This was also a charter school. I'm not familiar with charter schools but don't you have to pay to go to them?

$5 is nothing. if you get caught with a cell phone at my school then they take it away and force you to pay $15 if you want it back. still, I think school fines are bullshit. they make you pay $5 if you show up late or chew gum? what if they don't or can't pay the fine? hell, at my school, if they catch you chewing gum then they'll just make you spit it out. and there's no penalty for showing up late. that's what this school needs to be doing. and I really don't think people stick gum under the desks.

quote Roy

I would rather sit them in the back of the classroom and have them spit out the gum. Fining students is too harsh, since most students may or may not get an allowance of that much.

I couldn't agree with you more. School fines are bullshit, and any school fining students probably isn't worth going to.