Apparently if your child attends public school in Saratoga Springs, Florida then, despite the fact that you gave birth, feed and house, send to college, and buy Christmas gifts for "your children," they actually are owned by the state.
This is the only logical conclusion when school officials and state police tell a mom that she cannot legally bike with her child to school. He must ride the bus or she must drive a car to deposit him at the school door. No biking, no walking are allowed, not under her supervision and certainly not alone. Florida is not alone in this overreaching behavior. Massachusetts has prohibited parents from opting their children out of classes that promote homosexual marraige and California judges ruled that parents have no rights to what is being taught to their children.
The 12-year-old and his mother, Janette Kaddo Marino, are defying Saratoga Springs school policy by biking to Maple Avenue Middle School on Route 9. The Jackson Street residents pedal more than four miles together each way to the middle school on nice days despite being told not to by school officials and police. Times Union
I have never had to deal with getting a child to school, but this is one of my arguments against private school for our kids, the stress of getting 6 little people up and in the car every morning would drive me crazy. For the first few years of piano lessons we were blessed to be able to have Will and Mary ride their bikes to the teacher's house, and that was only once a week. I can't imagine some school official telling me how to raise my child, but I fear that this is going to be happening more and more often in the months and years ahead. We have changed from a nation inhabited by independent and tough pioneers to one ruled by controlling bureaucrats.
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7 comments:
Absolutely ridiculous! I truly despise the "Nanny State"!
Did you see this one? Absolutely outrageous!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090930/ap_on_re_us/us_baby_sitter_backlash_mich
that's nuts
UNBELIEVABLE!!!
If the school doesn't want them biking to school then she shouldn't be biking to school with him. I don't know what the reason the school has for the rule, or if it even makes a lick of sense, but what she is teaching her son is that if he doesn't like a rule, just ignore it and do what you want anyway. What she needs to do is teach her child how to get the rule changed. If she feels strongly enough about this, a very effective way would be for her, and anyone else who supports her, to pull their kids from a school they don't agree with. She can't be the only one who thinks this way. Parents need to start using the right before it is gone. Once a school starts to feel the economic effects students leaving the school they will become much more cooperative. Children are a commodity for school districts and when parents start voting with their feet by leaving schools the schools will change. Imagine if she could get 10, 20 or even 100 families to stop going to school until they can bike. Will it be an inconvience/uncomfortable for most of the families to start homeschooling or sending their kids to private/other schools? Sure it will, but sometimes that is the price to get things changed. There was another school listed in the article that does allow students to bike. If they aren't willing to make these scarafices then they are agreeing that this is an okay rule. And then as one person commented, the school will be telling us that our kids will be learning what ever the state has decided is fit for students to learn.
If no one will join her she needs to keep doing it alone. Then show up at each and every school board meeting. She can contact her media, which has already picked up on the story, alert green groups, which again she has. If this doesn't do it, she needs to contact her state and federal congressmen and senators and so on. Breaking the rule and grumbling about it is only an irritant to the school which they have no reason to do anything about. She also need to change her reason from 'it's healthy for my son and he has better consentration', which could be met in other ways, to 'I have the right to decided how my child will get to school and I want to exercise that right.' That arguement can not be settled any other way.
How things have changed!
When I was a kid, we climbed trees, went around barefoot, had the occasional playground fight, played rigorous sport & rode our pushbikes to school.
I wonder if that is why so many children are suffering from depression & AHDD....being controlled?
Dear "The Family",
Why, exactly, do you start with the premise that the school has any right to dictate how children should come to school?
The school could declare a new rule that all students must eat a banana at dinner on school nights... but everyone (hopefully) would laugh at them, and rightly so; it would be obviously outside of the school's authority to make such a rule.
It's sort of like one of my children declaring that the other siblings can't play with their own toys unless she says so. Ignoring the "rule" isn't teaching disrespect for rules, it's teaching that legitimate authority has boundaries.
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