Being mature young adults pursuing higher education, we’ve reached the point where acting out in a classroom makes you look less like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” and more like Zach Galifianakis in “The Hangover.” You just look stupid.
I like to think that if someone were to disrupt a class that I paid a large sum of money to sit in, a classmate would assist me in dragging said individual outside the building.
Unfortunately, this is not the case for our younger counterparts in middle and high school, where idiots who act out and occasionally get into fights are in abundance. Class gets disrupted by a few knuckleheads, and every student suffers due to the time it takes to discipline them.
This is why Republican state Sen. Elbert Guillory has introduced the Classroom Protection Act, or CPA. Guillory’s CPA would empower teachers to remove problematic students from their classes if they feel they are “in reasonable apprehension that he or a student in his classroom is in danger of receiving a battery or other form of imminent physical harm from a student.”
According to the senator, who spoke at a meeting of the LSU College Republicans last week, if a student decides that they are going to be “Billy Badass,” then the teacher can have police remove the student and bring them before a judge, who then calls in both of the student’s parents, and a course of action for the rehabilitation of the student is decided. It is then up to the teacher that removed them whether the student is allowed to come back to class.
Billy is going to have to do some groveling.
If it happens twice, that student will be remanded to an alternative learning facility for the remainder of the year.
The best part? There would be no extra bureaucracy added to the system.
It is about time a bill like this has come along in the legislature. Louisiana is consistently one of the worst states in terms of education, with only Mississippi doing worse than us. The CPA would give educators the power to send highly disruptive students somewhere besides the principal’s office, where they often receive only a slap on the wrist.
If passed, the provisions of the CPA would put the fear of God in them.
One who misinterprets this bill may cry foul if they think students removed are placed into the criminal justice system, but the fact of the matter is that there are no charges filed at all, provided the student did not commit a crime in the first place. It does not criminalize acting out, it just gives teachers more opportunity to maintain authority in their own classes.
Because we live in a state where an educator’s career now lives and dies by how well students perform on standardized tests, teachers need all the help they can get in terms of relaying a year’s curriculum by late March. It would give teachers in underperforming schools a fighting chance. Areas like Zachary, where my mother is a middle school science teacher, don’t really have an issue with students battering each other.
However, I can remember that when she taught in downtown Baton Rouge years back, fights and threats of violence were commonplace. If anything, the CPA would act as a nuclear deterrent for any student thinking about stepping out of line.
I’m just thankful that these measures aren’t necessary at the collegiate level. Maybe with the bill’s passage, Billy Badass might find himself at LSU one day.
Ryan McGehee is a 21-year-old political science, history and international studies senior from Zachary, La.
Empty desks line a classroom in Audubon Hall on Monday, October 14, 2013 at LSU.
