I agree with both of your extremes. There is a pretty big grey area in between though, which goes back to whether the deans are applying the rules with appropriate judgment.
Does this pair of pants make me look fat?
A lie is a lie. Kids and parents have agreed to the honor code. I doubt anyone would expel the student for being on facebook during study hall but the right thing for the student to do under the honor code is say what they were doing a accept the consequences. If a teacher walked by and saw the student on FB and the student immediately closed it down but was asked, the right response is - yes, I was and I am sorry for my actions.
Darling, I prefer you without pants. See what I did there?
cute non-answers don’t really work in this context, @Korab1. The questioner will keep demanding an affirmative or negative answer, and failure to do so itself is an offense. To the OP, my sympathy and gratitude for your post. Good luck with your challenges.
It depends on the skill of the interviewer/interrogator. The extent to which it is an offense or not depends on the individual school and their rule book. As I said before - read the rule book, know the rule book, and prepare your child for the rule book. Instruct your child that if anything serious hits the fan they don’t say anything until they talk to you.
If part of the reason for choosing a school that has an Honor Code is because you want your child to develop into a person who abstains from lying, cheating and stealing, and you feel it is important that they spend time around organizations and people with shared values, you do not help your child by preparing them with lessons on how to get away with it.
Yes, there may be consequences for truthfulness, and those may be hard lessons, but that is part of life. Better to become a man who tells the truth, even when it is not to his advantage, than to become a sleazeball who will lie his way out of trouble.
At one of my kids’ BS the school would do dorm sweeps, usually shortly after a vacation. They would tell the kids the inspection would be in something like 20 minutes, then they would leave a trash barrel in the hall and come back 20 minutes later. Anything left in the barrel would be carted away, no questions asked, but if the teachers then found anything in the kids’ rooms they’d throw the book at them. I liked this approach because it got illicit substances out of the dorms but didn’t require busting kids unless those kids were exceptionally stupid and chose not to throw out their booze/weed/bongs.It also probably alerted the school as to what kids were bringing back from vacation and how much they were dealing with on campus.
“…it was due to an action that would never lead to discipline at a non-boarding school.”
Don’t be too sure. At the public K-12 school where D attended elementary and middle school, they kicked out about 20 kids (out of a class of about 125) for smoking pot before school a few blocks away.
There is a difference between teaching someone how to get away with something and insuring that your kid’s rights are protected and that everyone plays by the rules. Maybe you trust the school to do so - I don’t. I am sending them a kid who already abstains from lying, cheating and stealing. I don’t expect them to do my work for me.
@tutumom2001 there is a difference between using marijuana immediately before school and coming in high vs. using off campus and returning sober the next day, which is what the OP’s son did. Regardless, it is true that the OP’s son’s conduct could still have consequences in a public school setting, especially since her son plays sports and the new rage in public schools is athletic contracts prohibiting bad behavior on campus, off campus, and everywhere else. Some even purport to apply 365 days a year.
Actions like OP do lead to consequences at non-boarding schools.
@123Mom456 Most parents wouldn’t call their kid’s soon-to-be-college to tell them they just caught their kid smoking pot or that their kid lied about it.
Parents might not, but some public schools would take action. Here’s an example of a public school district deciding to randomly drug test its students: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/carroll-county-start-randomly-drug-testing-student/53936511 .
@roethlisburger The article doesn’t say what the consequences are. Suspension? Expulsion? Notification of colleges?
I am so sorry your son had to go through this. I do think schools, both boarding and day, need a discipline overhaul. They need to distinguish between character offenses, such as deliberate plagiarism, and bonehead teenager offenses, such as drinking or trying pot. To punish a child so harshly for a one-time bad choice seems very unfair to me. And if they are going to have harsh penalties, they need a more thorough review process than simply searching a room and making the kid take a drug test.
There is a world of difference between a single infraction, and a repeated record of pot smoking or drinking, after being warned and given consequences. The former is one of the aforementioned “bonehead” teen mistakes; the latter is the beginning of a character problem. Schools need to look at the whole person, his previous record and character, before deciding on a punishment.
@CaliMex After looking at the student handbook for one of those schools, this is what I found. I don’t know what they do with respect to colleges.
- The automatic consequence for a first offense is partial suspension of the athletics or EC and loss of parking privileges.
- However, being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, either on school property or any school sponsored event, is governed by the regular discipline code and considered a level 3 offense. Level Three Offenses are so serious in nature that offenses will be cumulative grades 6-12 or 12 years old or older. All Level Three offenses shall be grounds for long-term suspension/expulsion. I can see a school arguing that someone is still under the influence, long after the initial high may have subsided.
- A student may be disciplined for any off-campus behavior which could result in the student being criminally charged with a felony and which makes the student's continued presence at school a potential danger to persons or property at the school or which disrupts the educational process. For drugs other than pot, this might allow the school to apply the regular disciplinary code, even to activity at a private home and after the student is no longer under the influence.
This is stressing me out. I am sending a goody two shoes 11th grader off to BS who has never tried any of this and who, frankly, is not interested (ironically part of reason he wants to go away is because many of the LPS kids are partying!). But we can’t control what he will get exposed to, away from home…esp at a school with a significant portion of day students.
I guess what I fear is, him being invited somewhere, and not realizing what type of “fun” the other kids plan to have. Then, any kid, guilty or abstaining, could get “caught”. I’m tempted to not let him go off campus to kids’ houses at all. Is that unreasonable for my 11th grade kid, though?
I had a neighbor whose public HS kid was brought to police station with an entire party of 50 kids; but he was not drinking. He eventually got off the hook, but that wasn’t without the cop bringing him home at 1am and his mother mortified, and a lot of stress. And once, I got accused of drinking in HS - when I did NOT drink at all and was always the designated driver - but something was left in the trunk of my car, unbeknownst to me - my dad never believed me.
With the current legislative trend (as well as the scientific research on marijuana), at some point in the future the use of marijuana by teens should be treated the same as under age drinking. Right now, at least on college campuses, drinking is dealt with pretty leniently. The idea is not to punish those who drink under 21 but to educate them to learn how to drink responsibly partly through the “trials and errors”. Unfortunately, right now in many states pot is still illegal, so the schools are essentially cracking down illegal activities committed by their students. So it’s not a matter of whether the schools should take punitive actions but rather whether the school administration is “liberal” enough to acknowledge without open acknowledgment that teens’ experimental pot use can be treated somewhat more leniently than hard drug use. The policies and rules in different schools can subtly reflect the school administration’s philosophy on pot and/vs drug I suppose.
@sunnyschool the vast majority of kids do not end up in disciplinary trouble. I am “that mom”- I still call day student parents before my kids spend time at their home. All the way through 12th grade. All parents I have met have been great. At our kids school, you as a parent have to fill out a permission form each time your child spends time at a day students home (if they are outside the immediate vicinity). The form also includes information about drivers etc. Kids are prohibited from riding in cars with other kids. I am sure your child will be fine.