My daughter was supposed to stay after school yesterday, but she said that the teachers had received an email from the administration to sweep the kids out of the school. All after-school programs were canceled for the day.
I called the school and found out what happened. The good news is that everyone is okay, there was no emergency. However, there is an ongoing issue the school is managing.
After school each day, hundreds of students without a valid purpose to still be at the school will hang around, in and outside the school buildings. The principal had heard that people from outside the school were joining this group of loiterers. If it's after school hours, then the teens are not supervised. Anytime you have a bunch of teenagers unsupervised, and add even more people to the mix who shouldn't be there is just going to breed trouble.
If anything happens at the school that is negative, of course the media is going to pick up on it and it makes the school look bad. The closure was to keep anything bad from happening on school property.
The close down involved holding the buses for 10 minutes to allow everyone who should be on a bus to get on one. Getting everyone out of the school enabled the administration to identify how many were there that should not be, and to move them away from school property. Every day, the school staff has to conduct a "sweep" of all the buildings, from Building D to Building E, to move all the people toward the school's Commons area. On most days, there are about 200 in the Commons area by the end of the sweep.
The school does have an after-school program on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 2:30 to 5:30 pm that provides snacks and tutoring. However, the loitering teens aren't interested in that. I think that maybe it's sort of like teens who stroll at the mall, to see and be seen. These teens don't have access to a 'cool' place like a mall, so they hang out at the school.
I've got to wonder what the home life is like for these kids, if they'd rather hang out at school than go home. What is happening at their house?
Society wants to label teens as uncontrollable animals, but they are just kids in adult-sized bodies. They need guidance, they need a safe place to be, and they need parents who are up to the task of raising them and providing a home that they want to return to.
UPDATES/RELATED LINKS
Gang activity concerns at South Gwinnett High School
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
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