News-Record.com

Kudos for the N&R calling it (correctly) a neighborhood fight and not a "gang" fight (which WFMY did, at least online, and they were wrong).

Quoting Hogg:
It was, as the N&R reports, a rumble between Cumberland Courts (which is near us) and Hampton Homes neighborhoods.

WFMY got their headline completely wrong. Probably playing to the more base of our sensibilities.

It was a neighborhood rumble, ala West Side Story (but most involved were from the east side).

My own definition of a gang begins with: criminal enterprise.

Brawling isn't a business activity.

Neither is it conducive to maintaining an orderly learning environment, so it does have to be dealt with sternly.

The teachers should let them fight it out until the police (who are paid for such things) arrive. In the end, however, this isn't the worst of all scenarios. If there were no weapons and no third parties involved, it really was a kind of West Side Story story: the good old fashioned violence of yesteryear.

If I were a teacher, I'd intervene if:

1. there was no weapon in use, and
2. one kid was getting the worst of it to the point of being in danger of serious harm. I don't think I could stand by and watch that.

The really good stuff is when the girls fight -

Westside Story was about 2 gangs....

The Sharks & the Jets.

This incident at Grimsley was all about 2 groups of street thugs; ie. gangs. Admit it, there is a serious problem here and it has penetrated all the way into Guilford County School #1. Now we'll see if something will be done.

Let's face it, these members of the local fight club don't want to be in school and they are disrupting those that do want to be there.

Enough already of the "we must protect our house" mantra.

When I went to school we got into trouble for chewing gum. Now a teacher getting the heck beat out of them in is common. I never saw a police in a school in my lifetime of going to school, now we have them in grade school. We have let the thugs take over the schools and made excuses for their behavior. Case and point the Jena 6, the media has spun this story to make hero"s out of them. We reap what we sow. I understand a teacher was assaulted in this fight, my money said, no one will go to jail.

School board member Walter Childs, quoted in our news story today, offered a very week excuse:

"They fight because they don't have the same kinds of things other kids have."

Like discipline?

Walter's argument seems to fall apart if you consider rappers who make millions still shooting each other in their Escalades, which has happened over and over again.

It's the wild-west culture. I think in some ways the thugs and rappers are taking the obsessive, materialistic culture the the US as a whole, both white and black, and putting a deadly spin on it, almost making a satirical statement of some kind saying "Look, I can have all this stuff money can buy but I'm still gonna fight, I'm still gonna kill . How do you like this materialistic culture now Mr. CEO and Mr. Politician?"

Maybe Walter is referring to non-material things, like love and family, which no external political initiatives can ever adress.

Call them gangs or community groups or whatever - I'm not sure the semantics really make much difference. The bottom line is that you have large groups of people brawling at Grimsley and bringing neighborhood grudges into the school.

It's a serious situation and sticking your head in the sand and claiming, "Grimsley doesn't have a gang problem" doesn't solve anything. Sure, no weapons were involved this time, but a teacher was hurt breaking up the melee - and who's to say there won't be weapons the next time? And what about all of the lost class time and the fear this incident created on the Grimsley campus? I know if I was a student there, I would have a tough time concentrating on my studies this week. This is unfair to the good kids who want to do the right thing.

We're seeing this kind of mob violence happen in most of our high schools, not just Grimsley. It's pretty clear that the Guilford County School Board simply hasn't made student safety a high enough priority.

The School Board is paralyzed by the fear that a crackdown on violent, disruptive behavior will be seen as racist (forgetting that the many well-behaved minority students are the victims of this violence, too). So they are letting the troublemakers run unchecked. The Greensboro and High Point police departments have reached out to the School Board in recent months, but the School Board isn't interested in working with law enforcement.

Perhaps it is time for some new blood on the School Board - before we have any more spilled blood in the halls of our high schools.

Good points.

Perhaps, just as public safety concerns boiled over as the top issue in Greensboro city elections this fall, and now are driving council action, school safety will rise to highest priority in the 2008 board of education elections.

I doubt it, Doug. The problem, as noted above, is the racial angle: any crackdown on discipline will disproportionately affect minorities. Your editorial today:

"Critics rightly cite racially disparate suspension statistics as a cause for concern. For instance, Guilford Schools Superintendent Terry Grier said Monday that "a black male student is 44 times more likely to be suspended at Grimsley.""

Forget the idiocy of Grier's statement, which makes a comparison without comparing anything. (44x more likely than an Asian male? more likely to be suspended at Grimsley than at Page?) Grier is paid to be such an idiot. Put another, such idiocy pays for Grier, because it's the coin of the realm in the education business. Were he to crack down and cause the number of minority suspensions to rise--a predictable outcome--he wouldn't win any awards and certainly couldn't get another job.

The N&R's official "concern" would also increase exponentially. "Dialogue" would be sought after.

And word would go out quietly to the teachers to maybe ease up a bit on enforcing discipline.

Personally, as I suggested above, I don't really care much about kids fighting if they want to. The more serious problem is classroom behavior. Give me a dozen kids brawling with each other any day than a dozen disrupting a classroom where other kids want (or at least are willing) to learn.

As Brian444 points out, Dr. Grier's comment about "a black male student is 44 times more likely to be suspended at Grimsley" doesn't really mean much. This only would be a problem if black males were being suspended for infractions that other kids weren't. I've seen no evidence to support the idea that black males are getting treated differently at Grimsley or any other school when they break the rules.

Schools shouldn't care about the race of students committing these offenses. They should simply care about providing a safe environment for the students who want to learn. The N&R's editorial was namby-pamby in that regard by giving credibility to the racial angle on school discipline. That's exactly the kind of thinking that has gotten us into the mess we have in Guilford County Schools.

Brian, I will have to disagree with you on the severity of the Grimsley incident. That fight (and others like it at Page, Southern, etc.) did disrupt learning that day and the day after. It's hard to concentrate in class if you are worried about getting jumped on the way to lunch or in the bathroom. Plus, we've seen school staff members get injured breaking up these brawls recently.

The editorial endorsed strong disciplinary action, but personally I tend to agree with you about group statistics. What matters is individual behavior, not what group the individual might belong to. Too much grouping causes us to under-emphasize individual accountability.

Just, if what you're proposing comes to pass, here's what happens: Without the R-card, the players on the schoolboard couldn't sound off- in turn to be placated by some no-bid contracts flowing to the right places. The Simkins PAC loses leverage, gets mad, doesn't support this that or the other white candidate for office in the next election, and John Robinson won't compsoe missives of "How can we heal Greensboro?

What you are proposing could precipitate GC and G-Boro socio-political collapse. Do you think Grier or any other GC pol. is going to do this?

Instead we'll go around and around in circles, all pretending.

Child's comments being called weak was an understatement, at best.

See:
http://erikhuey.wordpress.com/2007
/12/18/more-grimsley-fight-spin/

And trouble may be brewing at Western. See:

http://erikhuey.wordpress.com/2007
/12/18/big-problems-brewing-at-western-hs/

Erik, thanks for highlighting concerns, updating information and keeping the heat turned up.

No thanks needed, Doug. It's a public service and I'm happy to do it. As long as I continue to have a child in a Guilford Co. school (whether I win the election next year or not) and as long as we continue to have serious issues in our schools, I will continue to speak out. And at 17.5 thousand visitors and blog readers to my site, it seems as though someone out there is interested in what I have to say.

just saying and Brian444,

You just do not understand what race means in the context of our schools. In some eyes, our schools are permanently invested in institutional racism, and most of the people in our schools are racists. And, to those people, in the United States, racism and supremacy are synonyms. To those people, "white supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations and peoples of color by white peoples of European origin; for the purpose of establishing and maintaining wealth, power and privilege."

Our school system has paid hundreds of thousands for "anti-racism" workshops for teachers and school staff. The school system has gone so far as to hire Monica Walker, as Diversity Officer, at the salary of $80,000, and her only duty, as far as we can tell, is to teach Anti-Racism Workshops to school personnel, specifically teachers. I believe that completion of the Anti-Racism Workshops are a requirement for new Mission Possible teachers. The News-Record even highlighted her recently in one of their 10-Plus interviews. Where you listening closely to what she said? Ms. Walker is, or has been, associated with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, who teach Anti-Racism Workshops all around the country. (The People's Institute? Are you kidding us?)

http://www.prisonactivist.org/cws/understanding.html

So, race and racism is something that gets big play in Greensboro and our schools. So, when you hear Terry Grier make statements like "a black male student is 44 times more likely to be suspended at Grimsley", that is right out of the Anti-Racism play book. And, it is why these students get a pass and no discipline when they behaved badly in schools. So, as long as we have Terry Grier and the current school board, you will not see any changes in this matter.

There are only two metarules that should underpin all other rules at our schools:

1. No student may hurt him/herself or any other person, and

2. No student may act in such a way as to interfere in any other student's learning.

While the root causes of disturbances/fights at school are figured out and fixes applied, students who break the above two rules should be removed from school until they are ready and willing to adhere to them. Neither of these two rules are racially or culturally biased, so they can be accepted by anyone.

I agree. In regard to "cultural bias," there should be a school culture that overrides all else. Enforcing your rules 1 and 2 will protect that culture.

You can't throw out race in GC. If you do it will eventually lead to people who are getting paid now to NOT get paid or get paid differently in the future.

Now, I'm not putting down the people who are getting paid now-they are just doing what every good business man does, they've learned their Econ 101 lessons well, which is- they see a market and are exploiting it, whether it is administering multi-million dollar housing projects, universities, foundations , giving race seminars for 80K a year, or rustling up 1.5 million $ in no-bid contracts.

Obviously big repercussions will follow should people start thinking differently.

The problem arises when the view that all this is predicated on-that there is a systematic effort on the part of the white population to shaft the black population because of the color of their skin, has become divergent enough from present day reality that it grinds any efforts to deal effectively with present- day reality to a halt. Which is exactly what we seem to be approaching here in GC. Instead of taking any effective action, we pay lip service to the old premises and instead get lame smoke-screen papp journalism like "How Can Greensboro Heal"?

Thank you to Seth...I love your sarcasm.

I'll refresh everyone's memory on the recent investigative blog series I wrote about Monica Walker on my blog.

And as Skeet Club refers to...the constant harping by a particular school board member; I, for one, am growing weary of the constant race-baiting that occurs on a regular basis in this county. We need to recognize that while we are a people of different races, cultures, faiths and backgrounds, we need to continue to find ways to unite us, not divide us, as some of our elected officials want to do. We will never progress to the point where we need to unless this ceases. It has to stop.