New thought on Jessica Serafin case: old enough to drop out, old enough to vacate premises

http://nospank.net/n-u88.htm

New thought on Jessica Serafin case: old enough (18) to drop out of school legally; old enough to vacate premises at will. She never returned to that school in use of her right not to.

Her being held down to be paddled therefore may be seen at the state prosecution level as an unauthorized punishment -- the school was not operating "in loco parentis" from the moment she insisted on leaving. Anytime a student is corporeally punished without authority it should be prosecuted as an criminal assault under the normal statutes.

Being criminally detained to be physically assaulted raises the issue of kidnapping/illegal detainment (there are so many legal pitfalls once you cross the line of assaulting with a weapon).

LAST THOUGHT: the school had no more legal power to hold her down and beat her when she expressed desire to vacate the premises than it would have had to visit her home or grab her on the street and beat her. Whatever legal power the school has to beat students does not exist under these three circumstances.
******
Here in Chicago we have multiple incidents of teachers using corporal punishment after it has been banned in the state -- published widely in the media yet! -- and nobody thinks to prosecute every last instance.

We have to get over thinking of students as some kind of slaves to be whipped. Maybe what we need is a federal civil rights statute -- under the 14th Amendment's equal protection and enabling clauses -- to recognize that students may not be whipped without a compelling need (bringing chronic disorder to the point the institution permanently cannot function -- felony offenses -- the equivalent of self-defense). That is how far the parent's so-called "sovereignty" over children can be stretched to corporeally punish students and no more.

When I was in Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx our dean of discipline was thought the toughest in the city, Father Jablonski. But there was never any thought of corporal punishment. Priest, unlike nuns an brother, hear confessions. Priests are in charge of the Ten Commandments; they are concerned with drunkenness, pre-martial sex, stealing, dangerous violence, etc. -- the real moral struggles of Catholic school boys. Priests could care less about you being late for school -- be late every day. If you want to trade a minute in the morning for an hour after school that was your problem.


HERE ARE MY FINAL THOUGHTS ON SCHOOL CP -- FOR NOW:

Under my notion of constitutional equal protection, before legislatures are free to exempt school discipline from conventional assault prohibitions -- to allow corporal punishment -- they ought, first, to be able to identify a compelling state interest in deterring certain misbehaviors and, second, attest to an absence of workable alternatives -- the institutional equivalent of rules of engagement.

Practical example: if Oliver were leading a charge of kids on the lunch counter day after day and no other punishment restrained him -- the institutional equivalent of self-defense.

How much offense can be caused the great commonweal – as opposed to the likes and dislikes of deans of discipline -- if, for a practical example, occasionally disorganized students arrive a few minutes late for class every couple of weeks (20 times a year! -- as I did in high school; not in my shorter stay in college)? Many colleges do even not require students to show up for classes, so long as they master course materiel. Employers of the New York City of my youth would have been happy if employees only showed up a couple of minutes late for work only every couple of weeks given the state of rush hour commuting there.

The excuse most offered for exempting schools from normal assault prosecutions – in carrying out the equivalent of everyday office management – is that school teachers act “in loco parentis”, in place of parents. And everyone knows that parents may – as long as state law does not proscribe it – legally paddle children for even minor infractions.

However, so called “parental sovereignty” itself is less a natural verity and more a legal device to insulating sacrosanct family life from potentially crackpot state interference (parents may not legally strike children for no reason)...
…which compelling family privacy interest has absolutely zero application to school administration and in no way should exempt schools from conventional criminal prohibitions. Acting “in loco parentis” may constitutionally require student obedience; it does not confer any “parental sacrament” to disobey criminal law.

Whatever about instinctive human nature teaches us – sensibly -- to treat minor children as subordinates – may less sensibly – magnify their transgressions in our (bureaucratic?) eyes, especially repeated transgressions and -- even less sensibly -- put us on the (bureaucratic?) path to discipline for its own sake: the war on the student!

Legislatures should not feel free to suspend constitutional equal protection -- against assault with an instrument designed to deliver to slaves maximum pain but with minimum injury (same physics still delivers; same biology receives) -- in carrying out our sometimes too thoughtlessly applied genetic code of child deference.

For a very comprehensive treatment of school corporal punishment click on: Corporal Punishment in Schools: Economic, Liable, Practical, Ethical, Constitutional?