Every kid loves a day off from school. We all got up on those December and January mornings hours earlier than we normally would just to check the school closings to see if we had one of the greatest blessings ever handed down by a superintendent: the snow day.
Last school year, 18,000 students got extra days off on top of their scheduled ones in the Buffalo School District. They were suspended for one reason or another. Some were suspended for being late, some for violence. That translates to a student suspended every three minutes.
Fifteen-year-old Jawaan Daniels was one of those suspended students in June 2010. He was caught wandering the halls during class and suspended. After the silliness of preventing a kid from going to class because he wasn't going to class, Daniels went to catch a bus.
He was killed on his way home that very same day.
Last Wednesday, the Buffalo School board felt the wrath of frustrated parents and students protesting the suspensions. Many of the demonstrators argued that just kicking kids out added to crime rates, and starts kids down a road to prison.
Some of the offenses that kids are getting suspended for are downright stupid. Wearing a hood or ripped jeans, being late, or walking the halls out of turn apparently are all offenses that can get you kicked out for a day. Not only that, but a parent doesn't even have to come to get you. You just get kicked out.
Certain kids obviously need to be suspended. Violent kids can't be around other students. However, the protesters have a very good point. These massive amounts of suspensions shows how the school district has all but given up on the children it is supposed to serve.
When minor infractions bring suspensions, the kids at most risk for losing out on an education are given an officially sanctioned route to just go home. At that point it's not even a real consequence, the school is just dumping the problem out into the streets for the issue to be taken up by someone else.
In essence, to the district they're just another statistic.
Parents, however, also need to be a bigger part of this solution. Too often in this city are great, kind kids led down the wrong path because of the environment they're in, and the people with the greatest control of that are their parents.
A good solution would be to expand an in-school-suspension system that ensures kids won't get behind on their work. That way, a student is still punished for breaking rules, but is not simply turned loose so as to be easier to deal with.
Buffalo's youth is the key to the city's revival. 10 years from now, these students will be the community leaders, business owners, and blue-collar workers or the drug dealers, pimps, and murderers.
The perfect storm of degeneration that is Buffalo cannot be solved by one simple action, but every gear in the machine must do its part to get the city back to glory.
