School budget shortfall? Student discipline problems? Solve both by……charging for detention! A pair of school board members in Nutley, New Jersey are proposing precisely that. Yes, they’re serious.
The board members, Steven Rogers and Walter Sautter, say they are hoping to adopt a policy by next school year that would charge parents for detention, which they estimate costs the district $10,000 a year in overtime and maintenance fees.
“It may not seem like a lot of money, but it adds up over time,” Rogers tells the Newark Star-Ledger. “Parents need to step up to the plate and to be held responsible and accountable for their children’s habitual actions.”
Frank Bellusciop of the New Jersey School Board Association says even though schools charge for extracurricular activities and field trips, charging for detention may be in violation of the state Constitution. “Discipline is part of a public education,” he tells the paper. “Since detention would have to be used to enforce discipline, it is doubtful that you could charge for that, the same way you can’t charge for someone taking a history class or math class.”
Nutley. You can write your own punch line.
I have a lot of sympathy for this…
I do too, Rachel. Student discipline is still, to my mind, the single biggest (and least discussed) problem in terms of overall achievement. And I’m certainly not shy about pushing the problem back to the home to the degree possible. The idea of charging for detention because of budget reasons, however, is too clever by half. The two issues have nothing to do with one another.
Maybe I’m warped by the California experience*, but budget has to do with almost everything. Everything you have to spend money on limits what you can do in other areas.
*In our district, one of the questions is whether it’s appropriate for schools — which routinely put copy paper and boxes of tissues on their “wish lists” to parents — to request toilet paper donations.