http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/...507007/-1/news


I can't beleive that the school would not give the kid a break even though he techinically violated a rule. This is one case where the scholl could have and should cut the kid a break. If I was his age I would have sworn at the administration also. They could have given him a written warning if the had to. There are times when school administrators need to use some imagination.



[quote][Published: Saturday, May. 7, 2005
ATLANTA – A high school junior in a central Georgia military town was suspended from school this week after refusing to end a long-distance cell phone call from his mother, an Army sergeant serving in Iraq.

Kevin Francois, a 17-year-old student at Spencer High School in Columbus, Ga., was in the school cafeteria Wednesday when his mother, Sgt. 1st Class Monique Bates, called to check in with her son. When Francois went outside to get better reception, he was spotted by a teacher who – citing a district policy against cell phone use during school hours – told him to hang up.

Francois refused and subsequently was suspended for 10 days for disorderly conduct.

— Los Angeles Times/quote]

Give me a break! I could understand taking his cell phone away until the end of the day at worst, but a 10 day suspension is absurd.

Even if he wasn't talking to a parent in a war zone, that punishment seems a bit extreme (unless he was making a drug deal or something).

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If this was in New York City area or Ted Kennedy's Taxecusettes we could blame this on 'liberal bias" against the military. But I thought that places such as Georgia would not act like 'liberal military hating wimps" and cut the kid a break, just in this type of case.

Spencer High School has a large percentage of army brats. It's near Ft. Benning which has no high school of it's own. School officials there should know better than most about long separations. I'm all for suspension for kids who talk on their cell phones at school, but not in this case. Once they verified that it was his mother in Iraq, they should have just warned him. No wonder that all the kids I knew who went to Spencer hated it. My husband was an officer and never had a lot of choice as to when he could call home. You take the opportunity whenever it occurs - even during school hours.

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Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question... skip it.

12thman wrote Agree ! I'm retired Air Force and am well aware of what our 'brats' went through, and our wives, and us. Contact with home was very important. I don't say that we disregard rule breakage, but let's take certain cases in perspective. Also let's not lose our perspective.

We live in a world where school officials are so clueless that they need zero-tolerance rules.

Kids who get a call from a parent in Iraq should immediately be excused from class so they can talk as long as they want. It is a sad fact of war that a parent who calls one day may die before they are able to call again.

With that in mind, there is nothing going on in class that is more important than getting that call.

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"George W. Bush surrounds himself with smart people the way a hole surrounds itself with a donut." —Dennis Miller

http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20050507/D89UKH500.html

Under pressure, the school reduced the sentence to 3 days. Apparently, the kid is a bit of a troublemaker, but he was on his lunch break.

The world pretty much agrees with him.

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Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question... skip it.

If the story is as the student says, the school was way out of line.

There is a certain element of "he said, she said" here, though.

I would think the school's status as a longtime teacher of military kids would give them some credibility that the kid's story isn't precisely the truth. Whether that justifies the punishment is another question entirely.

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Man up.