BATH, Maine — Morse High School students were locked down in their classrooms Monday morning as five police canine units searched the school for drugs, but officials came up empty.
The “teaching lockdown” followed two practice drills in February, Morse Principal Peter Kahl said Tuesday.
This week, classes continued as dogs swept the school’s library, theater, gym areas and hallways, sniffing the doors of lockers but getting no “hits,” Bath Police Lt. Stan Cielinski said Monday.
Kahl said he modeled Monday’s drill on a search he observed at Brunswick High School.
Five minutes after the students were locked down — at about 9: 20 a.m. — Kahl checked the hallways and announced to teachers that they could continue to teach, but that no one should leave the classrooms.
“We’ve always wanted to have drug dogs come into the building because I think it sends a message that school is a place for learning and not a place to bring illegal substances,” Kahl said. “I’m not naïve enough to think that nothing like that happens at Morse High School, but I want to make students feel like this remains a safe spot.”
Random searches of the school by drug-sniffing dogs are new this year, following a December vote by the Regional School Unit 1 board of directors.
“The point here is not to catch people,” Superintendent Patrick Manuel told the board at the time. “The point is to send a message. This is another deterrent.”
On Tuesday, Manuel said he engaged high school administrators from the day he arrived in the district last summer about conducting the searches “and they were on the same page.”
Former superintendent William Shuttleworth opposed the practice due to what Manuel said Tuesday were “philosophical differences.”
But Manuel said he’s found drug searches and “teaching lockdowns” to be effective in keeping schools safe.
And with Brunswick, Mt. Ararat, Wiscasset and Boothbay Region high schools already conducting similar drug searches, Morse is the only area high school that did not allow the procedure, he said.
Manuel and Kahl also said they continue to work with local law enforcement officials to find funding — possibly in the form of grants — to bring a school resource office back to work with Morse’s 628 students.
Manuel and high school administration support the concept, he said, but simply don’t have the money this year — particularly with such a tight budget about to be reconciled.
“It’s all about money,” he said. “I have had conversations with [Sagadahoc County Sheriff] Joel Merry and [Bath Police Chief] Mike Field to see if there is any grant money out there. At this point, we’re really probably relying on finding some outside money to support it for maybe three years, and then we’ll figure out how to sustain it.”
Recent drug searches and the effort to fund an SRO are not indicative of any upsurge in drug use at Morse, Manuel said, noting instead that recent surveys in which students self-report their alcohol and drug use show Morse students are “no different than, I think, any community would be.”
But he said school officials must do what they can to ensure the school is “a safe place.”
Monday’s drug search — which lasted about 20 minutes, Kahl said — involved canine units from Bath, Lisbon, Sagadahoc and Kennebec county sheriff’s offices and the Maine State Police.
Another is planned before the end of the year, and dogs will enter the classrooms at that time.
Under that scenario, students will exit the classrooms and line up against the hallway wall, Kahl said. Then dogs will enter the classrooms and sniff backpacks.
“Dogs do not actually sniff the students,” he said. “It’s just too much of a liability and risk.”
Manuel praised high school administration and the Bath Police Department for “a very efficient and well-organized first-time through.”
“We can’t control everything 24-7, but we can try to control what goes on at our schools,” he said.
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“I think it sends a message that school is a place for learning and not a place to bring illegal substances.”
No, I think it sends a message that school administrators are bored out of their minds and watch too many cop shows on tv and love to fantasize about themselves as action heroes. What do students learn when they are ‘locked down’ and subject to drug-sniffing dogs and warrantless searches? They learn something for sure, but I doubt its what the administrators imagine they learn.
This goes too far.
And they want to further: ” Another is planned before the end of the year, and dogs will enter the classrooms at that time. Under that scenario, students will exit the classrooms and line up against the hallway wall, Kahl said.”
Up against the wall !
Having fun in your new and improved, Hopey-Changey police state, kiddies?
Don’t forget, Gitmo’s still open for business and we now have indefinite detention without trial!
“The point here is not to catch people,” Superintendent Patrick Manuel
told the board at the time. “The point is to send a message. This is
another deterrent.”
And that message is straight out of the Brown Shirt playbook
AND NO DRUGS WERE FOUND !!!
We could do this at the State House! Once, anyway….
Would have been kinda funny if they had found some Bath Salts….in Bath. Hey wait, is that where Bath Salts come from?
”
Kahl said he modeled Monday’s drill on a search he observed at Brunswick High School.”
They modeled it on prison.
I have zero tolerance for zero tolerance.
Is that what you want students learning ?
Never mind that is just not Christian, either, too.
Boy am I glad the police are part of this drill.
Well we know what schools and police do best, eh?
2 reads
1st read
see link for full story
http://7thspace.com/headlines/407511/three_jackson_police_officers_indicted_for_conspiracy_and_bribery.html
JACKSON, MS—Monyette Quintel Jefferson, 27; Terence Dale Jenkins,
25; and Anthony Ricardo Payne, Jr, 25, all Jackson Police Department
Patrol Officers at the time of the offense, have been indicted by a
federal grand jury on conspiracy and bribery charges relating to an
undercover investigation in which the defendants believed they were
protecting drug transactions.
The
indictment alleges that from approximately June 2009 through February
2012, the defendants conspired to commit bribery, carrying out their
criminal conduct on the following dates:
June 12, 2009—Jefferson
and Jenkins protected what they believed to be a drug shipment and
transaction of cocaine, and Jefferson accepted $3,000 in cash.
2nd read
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.” I don’t know who decides that my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make the kids like it — being locked in together, I mean — or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can’t imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students’ homes to spread approval or to mark exactly — down to a single percentage point — how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
Self-evaluation — the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet — is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness, too.
I assign “homework” so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.