Some Kindness Would Have Helped

News Flash! The members of the Rochester School Board are outstanding, caring members of our community who perform a difficult, time-consuming and largely thankless job week in and week out. They are not collecting huge salaries and charging transatlantic flights in private airliners to the taxpayers. They are volunteering countless hours of their time to help make our schools a better place, and they should not resign.

Let’s get a few things "straight" for the record. It was not their responsibility to become entangled in the day-to-day disciplinary actions of the school in the first place. The parent who brought this issue to the school board did not follow the correct protocol. Bringing this to the board’s attention was wildly inappropriate in the first place. It should have been immediately dismissed from the docket the night that it came up. This was an administrative issue that should have been turned back over to the building principal. Period.

Secondly, this has not been about favoritism to selected families; I believe that the school board was thinking about the well-being of the students who were being targeted by an angry parent. Justice is not served by individuals who are seeking to fulfill a vendetta. Please, don’t let last week’s letter confuse you; punishment does NOT equal justice or fairness. Fairness means that everyone gets what they need and I think these students needed some benign guidance from a responsible adult, such as the coach or teacher who was present that night at the "party."

I have been teaching long enough to learn that kindness and genuine concern for the well-being of students can go a very long way towards shaping kids into responsible adults. All these students needed was a kind word of advice from a caring adult, perhaps even a call to their mom and dad. This all could have been done in a caring way which could have demonstrated a sense of stewardship and a genuine concern for the individual students involved. Instead, this has become a three-ring circus.

Kindness from a responsible adult would have gone a long way towards nurturing and guiding these students to become nurturing and kind adults. Instead, punishment has been demanded. Study after study has proven that punishment teaches children nothing. It simply creates anger and a desire for payback. I personally believe that this is already about "payback" from the incident two years ago recounted in last week’s letter to the editor.

The whole idea of punishment equaling justice has turned this affair into a classic New England witch hunt. Like all witch hunts, at first a few individuals are targeted and later the accused burgeons to include a cast of thousands. Let’s see, first we wanted some athletes removed from a sports team, and now there is a call for the school board to resign. Hmm … I rest my case.

Neal Cronce

Rochester

(The Herald will not accept further letters about the athletic discipline case at Rochester High School.—Ed)

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