[CALIBK12] Library Fines in Ed Code?

[Blanche Woolls]

Hi,

Students who deliberately and maliciously destroy school property are 
delinquent. Perhaps children and teenagers playing around in a chemistry 
lab and break a testtube are destroying school property and they aren't 
acting responsively. On the other hand, the chemistry lab is a place where 
safety goes along with that broken test tube. Telling students that the 
investigators on the CSI shows aren't about breaking testtubes might make 
a point?

If I break a bowl in my kitchen, I can choose to replace it with a new 
bowl like the one I broke or I can choose to buy a steel or plastic bowl 
which won't break. It is my choice. What students use in the school 
kitchen is not their choice. Things broken accidentally seem outside the 
scope of asking the child to replace the broken object.

Unfortunately for students in school today, they have little choice about 
anything, even to do something if they aren't getting a very good 
education. School is not a chosen place to be and many students drop out 
as soon as they can. If school is a place with fines and charges and 
punishments everywhere they look, it means that leaving without an 
education is more painful than staying to get an education, especially 
when they can't see how the time they are putting into the classroom is 
really getting them ready for life (except those fines to teach them 
responsibility to pay their bills on time? and replacing broken testtubes 
to show them how they may have to replace something they drop or...)

If children could choose to go to a library where they wouldn't be 
penalized for forgetting to bring back a book rather than one where they 
do get charged fines, which do you think they would choose? Or maybe a 
better question is, "Are they already making that choice?" You just 
haven't missed them yet.

Blanche