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| n Huntsville, AL, the Broadie superintendent, Col. Casey Wardynski, has contracted out services for behavior problem and homebound students to a private corporation, The Pinnacle Schools. The contract includes five places in the “teepees” at Pinnacle’s Elk River Wilderness Treatment Program, one of those remote, secured boarding school/mental hospital/detention centers for students hand-selected by Wardynski. Stays there are of indefinite length: “Those who do not comport themselves according to the regulations and rules of Pinnacle Schools will find themselves living in a teepee. And they won’t be coming back until they can behave. And if they can’t behave, they won’t be coming back to our schools.”I can’t begin to imagine how this is legal, but there you are: http://abouthcs.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/theres-no-mention-of-teepees-in-the-2011-2012-hcs-handbook/ |
According to the link, the students get no legal representation. Apparently the superintendent wants to scare them so much that they dare not fight in school or exhibit any behavior that might lead to extreme punishment.
Is this supposed to be preparation for incarceration as an adult?
Does it save money?
Does it create a desirable climate of fear in the schools of Huntsville?
I wonder how parents feel about having their son or daughter sent away to live in a teepee for weeks or months.
There must be a reason to deal with adolescents with such a heavy hand.
What do you think it is?
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Discipline, we need a country of “disciplined” worker bees who will not complain when they can barely feed their families on the pittance of pay they receive from their masters. And then when the “disciplined” young are old enough they can enlist in the military to go kill on behalf of their masters. In other words they want a oligarchical feudal society.
Yup, I think you pretty much said it all!
. . . an oligarchical. . .
what ever happened to the notion of due process rights, even for the discipline of problematic solutions? Wonder what happens when the Broadie unilaterally imposes such discipline upon a student with an IEP and finds out that he has just violated federal law.
I’d like to see this program investigated and/or audited, to see if there are financial ties between the Superintendent and the corporation, and how much money is being diverted into private hands.
This is horrifying.
And why do kids misbehave in the first place? Often, it’s because school is sooooo dumb, disconnected, and uninteresting. Will the kids who are sent to these reform schools come back with greater interest in school? Will they be more inclined to get engaged? How will this help? It won’t.
I think more adults should read ‘Holes.’
What do you expect with an organization that doesn’t even require its “fellows” even be certified administrators? The Broad Academy is simply TFA for administrators.
I more than troubled by this. This reminds me of the southern prison depicted in “Cool Hand Luke” The only thing missing is the sweat boxes.To paraphrase George Kennedy’s character,” What we have here is a failure to communicate”. Hopefully parents and the public will take notice and do something about it.
Deep down, I hope it ends up as an expose on 60 Minutes with multiple indictments to follow. If we as society fail to properly educate and treat our young with dignity, we can only expect an uprising in the future that makes the French Revolution look like a bar fight.
What’s the significance of tepees? A Col.,now! What’s his education background? Did he get a degree after retirement? Or did he just apply to Broad? What was Huntsville thinking when they hired this fellow?
The teepees are a weird inversion of the Indian Boarding Schools. “Advanced students” get to live in cabins. We all know who lived in teepees, don’t we? And in cabins? The savages and the civilized. Nauseating.
An example of stereotyping for sure. It was my first thought. Thanks for the link. Housing now becomes a label!
This is from a Los Angeles public charter school: http://www.aimschools.org/aim_faq.shtml
“We’ve heard that American Indian disciplines students by shaving their heads. Isn’t that wrong?
If our founder had known how much press this story would generate, I think he would have shaved the heads of everyone at the school…. There was a student at American Indian who stole and was caught. The founder of the school talked to the students father, and together they decided to take from the student what he valued most (to teach him a meaningful lesson about why one shouldn’t steal). This young man loved his hair. This is what they took from him. The parent encouraged this, and it served as a valuable lesson for the student (and for every other student at the school). In this context, I think it was entirely appropriate. Stealing is wrong, and there are consequences for this behavior. Would it have been better to call the police and turn him into the juvenile detention center so that they could have pulled him out of school and locked him up?” (Please click on the link to be a witness to several other gems.)
We’ve heard from KIPP students they feel they are “Kids in the Prison Pipeline”.
Most charters have “strict” behavior policies (according to their websites and parents).
Teach For America, Teach Plus, Educators 4 Excellence only talk about themselves, the adults – never about serving, honoring kids and families and neighborhood communities.
I have had many people of affluence/influence say to me that one reason kids in poverty struggle is because they lack discipline. Same people use the “kids have no discipline” reason to put their kids in charters or private schools. Same people say behind closed doors, “I don’t want MY kids mixed up with THOSE kids.”
Most teacher education programs give a woefully incomplete treatment of classroom and community, of adolescent psychology, of our own personal biases that impact every single word, action, gesture, body movement, curricular/instructional choice that occurs in our classrooms, in our halls, and in conversations will all stakeholders.
When you say, no child left behind, no excuses, by any means necessary – with ZERO oversight or regulation of any kind – and leave the decisions for children best made by people who LIKE children to people who LIKE MONEY MORE – you get what we’ve got. We have got to stand up, speak out, and take action to protect our kids and their families from all things that only live to eat them up and spit them out.
Informative and wise. Thank you.
I hope and pray that Colonel Wardynski is not modeling the Huntsville school system after Ben Chavis’s American Indian Charter School or any variations of his philosophy.
If you’d like to see Ben’s contribution to American Education, I suggest you start by using the well sourced Wiki page at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Public_Charter_School#Extraordinary_audit
Pay particular attention to the following headings:
Extraordinary Audit – $3.7million in payments to Ben, his wife and the companies they control
Skepticism
Demographics
No Science or Computer Lab equipment
Racially and Sexually Charged Statements
In DC, we had Gen. Julius Becton, “commanding” the school system from November 1996 until April 1998. He survived three separate wars, but not the DC Public Schools. His biggest mistake was telling teachers at various mandatory city-wide meetings that he would last longer in the system than they would or will.
Hmm. AL did you say? makes me wonder what the ethnic ratio of these teepee kids is.
This is unacceptable! Sounds like the Christian group in Indiana that shipped “troubled” kids to a school in the Dominican Republic that would “fix” them.