Last week, along with 40 or 50 professionals in the school/juvenile field, I attended a half-day meeting convened by the Blaine County School District to discuss at-risk children and the school district's current expulsion policy. The school district should be commended for organizing this meeting. However, it was apparent that its administrators did not want to engage in a candid discussion of the merits of its current policy, which many believe throws kids out of school too quickly only to flounder aimlessly within our community. Many of these kids end up in felony court or as young parents in child protection cases.
While a number of laudable objectives were discussed at the meeting, the rigors of the current expulsion policy should be fair game for discussion. In the criminal justice field, a judge imposing sentence will look not only at the nature of the offense but the character of the offender. The judge has discretion to fashion an appropriate sentence on a case-by-case basis.
Hopefully, something positive will result from last week's meeting. Giving the Board of Trustees more discretion to do the right thing in appropriate cases would, in my view, be a step forward. However, two things are certain, the discussion needs to include the school district's expulsion policy itself and the participants of that discussion must include not just professionals hand-picked by the district, but parents and students. If not, what began as a hopeful discussion will find itself at the end of the day in the "round file" of squandered opportunity or, worse, as mere whitewash for questionable school policies.
Douglas Werth
Hailey
