Why This Country Sucks

I'm going to start a new series here called "Why This Country Sucks". Pretty much, I'm just going to identify a problem with this country and give a credible solution. There's a whole lot of overlap (go figure) so it'll probably be a pointless and confusing series. But there's going to be one major theme, I know. That is, individual accountability goes a whole lot farther than what you do for yourself and your family and friends. Individual accountability must be an accountability for the entire country (and ultimately the world) if you ever want to expel the phrase "this country sucks" from your vocabulary.

Today's lecture: On schools; specifically on in-school-suspension--why it's great and why it's so hard to find.

Did you know that the typical punishment for a child that skips school is out of school suspension for the day? So you just rewarded the child with the outcome that they wanted in the first place—they get to skip school. A suspension counts as an unexcused absence, which at the schools I've been to, 10 equal failing the class. So, if a student gets caught skipping school for one day, plus the day they get sent home for punishment, that's 2 days absent. The major reason for this is because schools don’t have an in school suspension program in place, generally because when the funding fails the extra teacher who doesn’t actually teach but supervises the delinquent children is let go. With no extra hands there to watch them, the students are sent home. If the parents were to all volunteer for just an hour a day to sit in that classroom then no students would have to be sent home as a reward for skipping school. I believe that no crime committed by students should result in an out of school suspension, including fighting. If we send them home, then those student who don’t want to be in school will start fights to be sent home. And what’s to stop them? They aren’t going to get some revelation while sitting at home in front of the TV screen that an education is the key to their future. We have to make it so that if nothing else no one slips through the cracks in the education system by being absent due to suspensions.