Girls HIgh Schools

barbara1

Thu, Sep 05 2019, 11:13 pm

amother [ Sapphire ] wrote:

Way to make assumptions and jump to the wrong conclusions!

I'm a BBY mother who is NOT AT ALL yeshivish or Lakewood type - yet somehow my daughter wasn't kicked out. How can that be? Simple. The girls who were asked to leave were - in plain English - bummy. That's the reason they were kicked out. In addition to that, they flouted the school rules. I saw this myself all the time. They also disrupted the class so much that my daughter would complain to me that she's not learning anything because the teachers can't teach. The girls would flat out ignore the teachers.

So for the person who said how "unfair" the school is for kicking out these girls, is it fair to my daughter and the rest of the decent girls to go to school every day and not learn anything because of these girls? Is it fair that they should be exposed to underage drinking and inappropriate conversations? Because that's what these girls were doing - among other things.

To set the record straight, it wasn't half the school, not even close. I heard it's 5 girls from my daughter's grade of 60, though I don't know for sure if that's the correct number and whether there were more girls from other grades or not. They didn't even indiscriminately throw out every problematic girl. I know of a few that they kept that are somewhat problematic that they think they can still help. And no they didn't do it the last minute. I happened to hear about this a few weeks into July. By then the girls had already been asked to leave - I have no idea how long before that it was actually done. It might have been right after the school year or at most, a few weeks later. Also, the school didn't take this lightly and did it under the guidance of rabbonim.

What should truly make you sad here is that the only "hypothesis" you could manage to think of is rich parents with sinas chinam paying off the school. You could just as easily have thought that maybe the school is just doing the right thing - even if it means a financial loss for them. I know I complained to the school a few times but I'm definitely not paying them off. I get a tuition break on top of my tuition break.

Yet another "hypothesis" you could have thought of - if altruistic reasons were too much of a stretch for you - was that the school was indeed self serving. Maybe they decided that they stand to make more money long term if they have a good school with a good reputation - even if they have to take a short term loss this year. Maybe it was a combination of reasons. Either way, they did the right thing in the right way and I thank them for it.

In 11th grade Bnos Bais Yaakov started today minus 40 girls so it's not 6 girls from each grade its allot more than 6.

amother

Lime

Fri, Sep 06 2019, 1:29 am

amother [ Sapphire ] wrote:

Please try to be honest and accurate - as I have been. This is what I wrote (copied and pasted from the original post):

"To set the record straight, it wasn't half the school, not even close. I heard it's 5 girls from my daughter's grade of 60, though I don't know for sure if that's the correct number and whether there were more girls from other grades or not."

Today was only orientation so they were there for an hour or two and my daughter didn't get a good idea of how many girls weren't there. She noticed 4 missing from her grade but there could very well be more than that. She'll try to get a better idea on Monday.

I too have an eleventh grade daughter. She is not in a BY, we do not live in Lakewood or Brooklyn. These schools do not pertain to us, they not our haskafa.

I understand the schools not wanting to keep "bad kids" or kids who might negatively influenced the others. But no child should not have a school!!! Even one child is one child too many.!!!
By us, they rotate and split up the kids. The kids don't necessarily get to go where they want and they are separated from their friends. Each school gets some and when kids need to be kicked out.... they trade them from one school to the other. But ever child has a spot in a school. Everyone has a place to belong, a place to learn and a place to grow.

amother

Sapphire

Fri, Sep 06 2019, 2:28 am

amother [ Lime ] wrote:

That's a commendable system. The Lakewood Vaad would be the ones responsible for implementing something like that. The school system is really crazy in Lakewood. Girls going into high school have to apply to 5 schools and go to whichever one accepts them - often without their friends. Only a lucky (connected?) few get accepted to more than one and get to choose. For the girls who don't get accepted anywhere, the Vaad pressures schools to take them in. BBY caved the most to the Vaad and accepted more than their fair share of problematic girls whom none of the other schools were willing to take. That's what led to the current situation where they had to ask several? many? tbd.... girls to leave.

I'm thinking maybe the Vaad isn't inclined to help the girls who were kicked out because they already worked hard for them before 9th grade to get them into a school in the first place and then the girls didn't do their part to make sure they remained in those schools. When I first heard that girls were misbehaving, I found it so hard to believe. It's well known that the Lakewood high school acceptance process is hell, with a number of girls not getting accepted until right before school (I think last year there were a few who got accepted literally the day before and had to run and buy uniforms the last minute.) After going through that hell, one would think that the girls would be grateful to have gotten into a school and wouldn't take the risk of getting thrown out. Dont know

amother

Wine

Fri, Sep 06 2019, 3:57 am

amother [ Amber ] wrote:

You have a good point, but you also dont!! What I mean is...since there is no school for these kids, are you opening one or are you saying that they shld go to public school???

Also, lets not deny that ppl with a lot of $, whose kids are disrespectful and may have physical bullying behaviors are allowed to "pay their way" into schools and majority of time wont be kicked out....so its not as simple as you make it seem that schools are all getting rid of "certain kids".....bec ppl with connections/"yichus" and $ would rarely have their "problem" kids "asked to leave". Theres a lot of bias and its not simple....

But, again, shld these kids go to public school??

I feel for you, op.

Absolutely, this. The following memories are not about me; I was a good, studious, perhaps overly serious kid who did not disrupt class. I remember that most of the real troublemakers, the kids who disrupted class to the point that the teachers basically sat down and didn't teach, were the kids of the "machers" in the community. They could disrupt class, they could beat up other girls until they were a bloody pulp, and nothing ever happened to them. They were never threatened with suspension, let alone expulsion. At the same time, there were kids who were labeled troublemakers. They were basically just sitting in the back of class, not always perfectly behaved, maybe crocheting in class, passing notes, and giggling, but not disrupting in any active sense. Their parents were nobodies, often from outside the community, rarely with money. They'd last maybe one or two years in class and then they were gone.

Fast forward decades later. The daughters of the machers made good marriages, have lots of kids, and often are in chinuch themselves. (The last fact horrifies me, especially remembering the cruelty of these kids.) I've mostly lost touch with the kids who were kicked out. Some of them made it. Some didn't. I don't think it was that the principals "knew" who the "good" kids were. It's that if you got to stay in school, if you had a stable education, and certainly, if your parents had money, you were much more likely to succeed, relative to the criteria of the frum community, than if you didn't.

As far as teachers who sit down and don't teach class: There is little excuse. (I changed to amother now to recount this part of the story, since it possibly identifies me.) When I was student teaching in my old school, at the end of seminary, I took over a class whose teacher was away for a few days. After the first hour or so, behavior deteriorated and everyone started talking, singing, standing on their chairs, etc. The worst troublemakers were unsurprisingly the younger siblings of many of the worst troublemakers that I remembered from school years back. I screamed at them to be quiet and to sit down, and I managed to get through the morning, but I knew that screaming was not the way to go.

That evening, I called up a mechaneches whom I've seen mentioned here as an excellent principal, and who had been one of my teachers in high school. I told her what had happened and asked for advice. She told me that in her experience, much of it depended on the expectations you came in with. If you truly expected the kids to behave, if from the beginning, you noticed any infraction and silently communicated the fact that this was unacceptable behavior, behavior would be unlikely to deteriorate. Walking into a class, into any new situation, with an expectation. It was a new concept to me. It was loosey-goosey and didn't exactly provide me with a plan of action.

But we communicate silently more than we know, and our attitudes matter. I spent the evening talking myself up, strengthening myself. The next morning I walked into class. I was calm. I expected good behavior. My eyes swept the classroom and noticed the slightest infraction. I caught the eye of each infractor for a second, gave them what my children now call "the look," and that girl stopped rummaging in her purse, or humming, or whatever it was that she was doing. I didn't have to speak much to get them into line. I taught with relative ease. Not so easy, because it's hard to teach chumash or navi, keep kids enthused and involved in discussion, and still notice every test of limits and nip that in the bud.

Honestly, that experience convinced me that I was not cut out for teaching middle school or high school. I didn't want to have to be that vigilant every day. But it also showed me that it's possible to do. (It is also a skill that I've used in other areas of my life.) I thought back about the teachers who had lost control of our class, the ones who had to call in the principal to restore order, sometimes by threats of getting kicked out, and I realized that keeping discipline in part is a skill that teachers can learn. I'm not a pollyanna. I know that there are some kids who have oppositional defiant disorder or other serious issues. But for your garden variety troublemaker who is just testing limits? Yes, a teacher should be able to handle that.