So somebody at a non-public school does something or many things and as a result is asked to leave. Clearly the school is at fault and must be publically excoriated, at least in the mind of the compainer. However I beg to differ. No school is right for every child, and sometimes the only option for a student (or family) who is not mission-appopriate, and assuing that discrimination is not a factor, is to ask him or her to leave.
What those raging against this separation fail to accept is that they are not more important than the school, and that when the family signs up for the school it accepts the school's culture and philosophy, and its policies and procedures also known as the enrolment agreement or contract. The school accepts the student based on what they it sees in front of the admissions office, and on what it thinks will happen, and on the family's commitment to the agreement. Where a student is not what s/she seems or turns out to be someone quite different from who she was, or the family fails to keep to its side of the deal, the school must have the right to sever the relationship. If not, other students or faculty or the school itself may be harmed.
And it goes without saying that in today's litigious world, risk management is a powerful if not dominating force. No school wants to, and few can afford to, be sued because of the actions of a wayward youth.
An obvious example is where a student becomes a criminal or gang member or drug-dealer. Few schools are able to deal with any of these scenarios, and keeping that student may well lead to problems with him/her or for other students. Similarly a student who is violent or who attacks or assaults another member of the school's community presents a risk and danger.
Less obvious is where a student develops some kind of need requiring pyschologial or emotional support the school cannot provide, or its faculty are not equipped to offer. Often in this case, the family is not willing to accept that its little prince(ss) is special. Every school has its own Florence Foster Jenkins tales, sometimes Ms Jenkins on steroids.
Sometimes, the best thing for the student is to be sent elsewhere and here I must share two anecdotes. As a school principal, I once had a six year-old who began to exhibit unacceptable and age-inappropriate sexual behavior. He tried to touch female classmates, he began to follow them into the bathroom, he made gestures and comments. The parents of two of these girls made informal complaints, and a third said she did not want her daughter to be alone with the boy.
I called the boys mother in for an informal, first contact, "did you know that ...?" meeting. She reacted badly, shouting at me, swearing and calling me a pervert and a pedophile. I eventually had to ask her to leave the campus and I banned her from setting foot on the school site. However, the boy again did something and this together with other actions such as destroying a classmate's artwork, lying to the teacher about something he had done and drawing over walls and furniture with wax crayons to show his displeasure meant I made the decision to expel him.
However there is more to this than that. Likely no other non-public school in the city would accept the boy given that we had ejected him, and in that state, public schools could impose enrolment restrictions. So when I received the records request from a public district school across town, I called the principal and read to him a carefully-prepared by an attorney statement. The result was that the new school required a pyschologist's report which revealed mom had a new driug-dealing gang-member boyfriend with whom she was angaging physically whenever and wherever. The boy was simply acting out what he was seeing at home.
The father was able to gain custody and got the boy counselling, and he turned around and became a decent young man. The mother cleaned herself up, went to drug-counselling, went back to college and similarly re-invented herself. While traumatic at the time, none of this would have happened if I had not had the power of expulsion; the boy was on a downward trajectory and things would have only gotten worse.
I have another story where things did not work out so well. A young boy was stabbing himself, furniture and toys etc with scissors and although they were locked away, whenever he could he did and it led to his using staplers and sharpened pencils. Again mom refused to accept reality and again we reached the point (see what I did there?) where to protect other students and the teacher, I was forced to ask the family to leave. They did, and mom blasted us all over social media making statements which were untrue, derogatory and defamatory and to which we could not respond due to privacy laws.
A few years later, I read in the local paper that the boy had hurt another student with something sharp. I have often wondered since whether that could have been prevented if mom had listened to us, but at least I had kept some students safe. And again, this would have happened if I had not had the power of expulsion.
**Please leave comments and queries below**
Further Reading
https://news.yahoo.com/im-2nd-generation-private-school-090742800.html
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