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An Australian friend draws our attention to two stories that appeared in the Australian press last week:
The government of Western Australia is considering placing police officers in that state’s high schools, in response to a recent increase in assaults on teachers there…
…And an officer assigned to an “elite unit designed to be the public face of [the] police in high schools” in the state of New South Wales has been arrested on charges that he sexually assaulted a child.
This is just one incident, of course. But it does serve as a reminder that whatever the benefits to teachers and students of bringing police onto school grounds may be, the practice carries real costs as well.
(Thanks to lauredhel of Hoyden About Town for the tip.)
The British police have in recent months opened files on more than two hundred students who have been identified as potential “criminals and would-be terrorists” by teachers and other authority figures.
Under a program called the “Channel project,” launched in selected British localities 18 months ago, Muslim students who have expressed “bad attitudes towards ‘the West'” have been reported to the police and subsequently subjected to formal intervention by community members or government officals. Such intervention is said to range from meetings with religious leaders to investigation by social services workers and “intervention directly by the police.”
Students targeted by the Channel project have been as young as thirteen.
Quick hit, via Inside Higher Ed:
“A new research study … has found that ending the [SAT] requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.”
Chris Quintanilla, a 14-year-old eighth-grader in Peoria, Arizona, says he was told by his principal to remove a rainbow wristband that carried the slogan “Rainbows Are Gay.”
The student’s mother says that when she talked to the principal about his action, he told her that some teachers found the phrase offensive.
This is not the first time Natali Quintanilla and the principal have clashed over the school’s treatment of her son. She says that when she told him that Chris was being harassed at school for being gay earlier this year, she was told that he wouldn’t be picked on “if he didn’t put it out there the way he does.”
Unable to secure protection of her son’s free-speech rights directly through the school, Natali Quintanilla took the issue to the ACLU.
The ACLU sent the school district a three-page letter reminding them of students’ free speech rights in school, and asked them to “confirm … within 10 days” that “the District will now allow Chris and other students to wear or otherwise display messages or symbols expressing their support of LGBT rights.”
The district has not yet responded.
April 20 update: Quintanilla has been cleared to start wearing the wristband again.
High school girls in an auto repair class in Central High School, Washington DC, 1927.
The Negro History Club of Albany State College in Georgia, 1940.
studentactivism.net 
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