Thursday, January 26, 2006
Nancy Nall on Carroll High School
Nancy Nall, former News-Sentinel columnist and now a Michigander, writes about the Northwest Allen County Schools and its treatment of Jeff Fraser.
One of her readers, self-described as a former Carroll student ('79) has some interesting things to say.
It's all on NancyNall.com:
And then Alex has his say:In Fort Wayne — speaking of things no one cares about — there’s been a mini-drama going on in blogs and (to a far lesser extent) in the newspaper, regarding a student’s expulsion over the “publication” (photocopying, I presume) of a “book” about his high school. It’s supposed to be a hilarious send-up of Carroll High School life, written in the tone and spirit of Jon Stewart’s “America (the book).”
School officials responded to this impertinence in the usual Allen County high-school-administrator fashion — i.e., they expelled the kid. (Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen had nothing on these folks.) One thing you need to know: The kid is either a founder or a member of the Allen County Teenage Republicans, which means he’s getting an awful lot of hand-holding and support from non-teenage Republicans in the area.
And all this discussion has been happening with only a few people having actually seen the book in question.
Well. Nathan Gotsch at Fort Wayne Observed has scanned and posted all 14 pages, and now we can all judge for ourselves. My take: Expulsion was overreacting, but if this kid thinks he has a career in comedy, he has inordinately high self-esteem.
My further cynical take: In two years he’ll be at some comfy university, offering $100 for examples of professors with liberal bias. Yawn. Fifteen minutes up….now.
As a Carroll alum (’79) it’s fun to see how suburbanization and the Age of Zero Tolerance has changed the place. When I was there it was a small country school. Today it’s a huge mega-campus.
In my day, expulsions were rare (and often reversed following threats of litigation from the pompous-ass lower-tier executive types who were the pioneers of the exurban migration). These folks regarded the administration as a bunch of rubes, which they were and probably still are, but operated under the delusion that only the farm and hilljack kids’ s*** smelled like s***.
Yeah, the punishment in the instant case is draconian, but not surprising. I see Mr. Niles Pfafman is still there and after all the abuse he and other administrators have taken over the years from the imperious nouveau riche p****s they deal with — and I’m talking about parents and the children of such — it’s no wonder they come down so hard.
