-=> Quoting Damon A. Getsman to All on 05-05-16  07:02 <=-

Hmmm.... it appears that nobody else has even tried to touch this in my
absence....   

 DAG> Okay, so I've got some issues with my son that I've really got to
 DAG> get to the bottom of, and I guess I'm a bit stumped on what to do with
 DAG> it all.  My son's been getting in trouble more and more lately,
 DAG> primarily in his afterschool program.  He's hated that program for a
 DAG> very long time.  At first I thought it was primarily because it was
 DAG> cutting into his videogame time, but I'm really starting to think that
 DAG> there's a lot more going on there than I was aware of.

Not terribly surprising, actually...

 DAG> Unfortunately he's ended up falling in with some of the more dirty
 DAG> mouthed and trouble prone kids in the school there.  I think it's
 DAG> probably because they move around a lot, and when the kids were looking
 DAG> for new friends he ended up finding them due to the fact that everybody
 DAG> else already had a bunch of friends from previous years at that school. 

It might also be partly that they'd be likely candidates for the
afterschool program, due to family situations and/or being kept after
for detention, or such... along with his being somewhat an odd man out
himself... 

 DAG> I can't very well expect him to finish the school year without any
 DAG> friends, so I'm trying to help teach him to make the right choices
 DAG> when those friends are doing things that'll get others in trouble.

And those friends probably also need to have friends, as well..
hopefully ones to help them stay OUT of trouble...    It's a good
thing to be teaching your son how to manage such friends, and the
temptations they present... 

 DAG> I think he's been doing pretty well with it, all things considered,
 DAG> but there may be some bias going on with the staff there, as well. 
 DAG> I don't know if it's some form of racism or another bias (my son
 DAG> being half African), but whatever it is I think I'm going to have
 DAG> to go talk to the school about it.

Possibly the staff at the afterschool program aren't happy to be stuck
with the job... they still shouldn't be taking it out on the kids,
though... 

 DAG> One of the first things that happened is that somebody left
 DAG> a purse with money in it laying around at the school and he, plus one
 DAG> of his friends (whom I really don't trust) ended up being around it at
 DAG> one point.  When somebody found out that there was missing cash from
 DAG> there, they ended up looking for clues from the class as to where it
 DAG> went.  Turns out that most of the class fingered my son and his friend
 DAG> about it.  I trust my son for the most part, but I don't know if maybe
 DAG> his friend did something and took that money (I really don't trust the
 DAG> kid or his mom-- the kid alone is a bucket of unending lies to try to
 DAG> have something interesting to say); or maybe he did get my son to try
 DAG> taking something...  It's so hard to know for sure.

If your son didn't show up with money whose provenence was sketchy, he
probably wasn't the one to have taken any... the other kid possibly...
But also possible that the allegedly stolen money wasn't there in the
first place...  Why would a teacher/aide leave a purse just lying
around, and not properly secured in that sort of setting, anyway....?!  
As you say, it's hard to know for sure what the real story is. 

 DAG> After that, I ended up going in to pick him up one afternoon and
 DAG> showed up right at the same time that one of the staff who I think
 DAG> might have a bit of a grudge against my son was pulling him and two of
 DAG> his friends out of class in order to 'make them stop being so
 DAG> negative.'  She was literally shaking with rage, and the kids were all
 DAG> telling stories about how she'd pushed one of them. I don't know what
 DAG> happened with that, due to not being there to see it, but I do know
 DAG> that whenever you've got somebody in charge of others who is shaking
 DAG> with rage like that that something bad happened and could easily have
 DAG> triggered her into some inappropriate actions, too.  She had just sat
 DAG> them down to write some sentence about being negative 100 times, but I
 DAG> was picking him up at the same time.  I ended up grounding him for that
 DAG> one, primarily because I knew that something bad had happened, and I
 DAG> figured it was as good of a time as any to try to make sure that my son
 DAG> is steering clear of others' negative behavior, even if it is funny or
 DAG> amusing at the time.  Seems to have worked well here.

I think you handled that one well, too... One does wonder about the
staff worker, though... Even if the kids were being very negative, and
causing a scene, she's the adult... and school is not the place to be
letting the kids get to you... Sounds like they need (as we've been
discussing in the memories echo) a special screaming room for the staff
to use... but at appropriate times....   Parents learn that screaming
at kids is counterproductive and inappropriate, at least they should be
learning that, and teachers and school staff need to also...  

Splitting to another message.... 

ttyl          neb

... "I just must be monumentally naive."  "You are."

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