Weekly Digression

Kids. They grow up way to fast. I am typically a planner in life and try to map out the future way ahead of time. Early in the week, I realized that my oldest boy who will be turning four in May will start pre-k in August. It seems like yesterday, he was just a baby and I was hollering at my wife to come and change his diaper because he pooped. But the time has flown and I as I looked through some pictures over the years, it is rather amazing to see his transgressions from a baby to a little, independent boy.

One of the things that does scare me is all the violence in the schools. And it is not just the students but now teachers are involved. I read this article a few weeks ago but dismissed it as I really never put any context into it, other than it was pathetic of those teachers to do this. Evidently, a fourth grade teacher set up a fight club in his classroom and even when the students got hurt and saw the nurse, she just covered it up as well. The only reason it was discovered is that a students father overheard his son complaining that he didn't have a lot of classmates in his corner and it upset him. After the father got it out of his son, the police did arrest the teacher and his aide.

I think that it is absolutely pathetic that a teacher would do something like this. It seems like almost every week, you hear on the news about a student getting killed, a fight breaking out, or even worse a child gets kidnapped. The world is becoming a more negative place and scary for children to grow up unless you do some research and move into an area that is generally safe. But the main issue is the schools. Do you trust the public school system to adequately protect your student? Or will the time come when enrolling your child you sign away the right for safety and the school just leaves it up to the students to protect themselves? I went to a poor center city high school and we had uncover cops posing as students with us our senior year. To this day, we still don't know if they actually existed but we were told that they were there. This was 12 years ago, and even then the schools had metal detectors. I was so glad to get out.

But really, what do you do? Do you put your kid in private school and shelter them from the real world, or do you let them be exposed to the dangers and pray that something doesn't harm them? Only time will tell which route I will go, but at the first sign of my kid joining his kindergarten fight club, he won't adhere to the first rule of fight club which is " Don't talk about Fight Club", because my son likes to ramble on and on, and he can't keep a secret. I have no worries there.