Utah, USA: Uproar and apologies when public school teacher forced Catholic student to wipe Ash Wednesday cross off his forehead

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We always got our ashes before school. I took my kids to Mass before school. What’s really weird to me is that in our local news, the kid was shown in a photo in his home with the ashes, with a really sad face. I’ve never found time between Mass and school to take my kids home and photograph them with their ashes and sad puppy dog faces prior to taking them to school.
 
Allegra said:
What’s really weird to me is that in our local news, the kid was shown in a photo in his home with the ashes, with a really sad face. I’ve never found time between Mass and school to take my kids home and photograph them with their ashes and sad puppy dog faces prior to taking them to school.
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From the school’s account:
“The district added that it called its director of educational equity, who is also an ordained Catholic deacon. He reapplied the ash cross to Williams’ forehead that afternoon.”
 
Yes. I went to a big high school. Seemed to be set up mainly to insure that the juvenile delinquents didn’t cause too much trouble. I felt that we were all treated like prisoners. (This, after a wonderful experience in Junior High.) I went half a day to a technical school, in the morning, and one day I missed the bus back to the high school. I got a ride to the bus garage and walked the rest of the way back to school. I was treated like a suspect in a major crime case. The assistant principal, actually more like the appointed warden, called and screamed at my mother. The next day he had me in his office to scream at me, and I got one or two detentions. Hey, it was a missed bus! I was a good student with no juvenile record, just a suburban girl in the last year of high school.

I think if you go to a smaller school–much smaller–or a Catholic school, you are treated more as an individual, not part of the school punk problem that has to be kept under control.
 
So, they got an written apology, candy, and the district obtained the services of deacon to come and re-administer the ashes and they are STILL pitching a fit? Does anyone else find this just a little bit petty? Wasn’t Lent supposed to be about humility and forgiveness or something like that?
 
I went to Catholic schools all my life. They have their own set of problems. For example, some kids may get special treatment because they come from legacy families or their parents are big donors. And, although they are private institutions and you’d think they’d care about quality because parents actually pay for their services, there are still plenty of tenured teachers that really have no business being there. In high school, have the lousiest ones to teach seniors because it does not make sense to transfer schools in the middle of your senior year when you find out that your teachers are duds and the school won’t do anything about it because so and so is a vital member of our community or whatever.

I’ve been threatened with expulsion for bringing up complaints my senior year despite being the valedictorian. Even when you try to work with them and play by their rules, they treat you like garbage. I had plenty of well-intentioned instructors over the years, but, in the end of the day, I have found that every school behaves like a mafia from grammar school to university.
 
I believe it was an honest mistake.
But it does highlight the fact many (Western) Christian traditions that are beneficial in learning about the Faith are becoming unknown and alien throughout the Western world. I find the wholesale abandonment of traditions within Christianity detrimental to Christianity and culture.
 
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Allegra said:
So, they got an written apology, candy, and the district obtained the services of deacon to come and re-administer the ashes and they are STILL pitching a fit? Does anyone else find this just a little bit petty? Wasn’t Lent supposed to be about humility and forgiveness or something like that?
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It’s my understanding from the Fox News article I posted in the News thread on this same exact story yesterday that the family is okay with things, has accepted the teacher’s apology, even went so far as to say she’s a good teacher, the kid forgave her, etc.

I would imagine that the school is probably still getting flak from people all over the country because the story went viral, and that furthermore there may have been some sort of violation of a school policy involved that requires them to follow an investigation procedure. Once these stories go viral, it’s no longer about the individual family and has a lot to do with the reputation of the school and other consequences it can suffer if perceived publicly as discriminating in some way.
 
The situation should have been handled better.

Of course, I say this having seen a similar situation handled right.
In this case the teacher simply let the ashes stay and upped the ante.
“Turn in a single page report on Ash Wednesday tomorrow. If I am satisfied with it, you get extra credit…if I am not, disciplinary action for class disruption.”
 
Be that as it may, no one has to let a news crew into their livingroom to question their kid about a mistake their teacher made. Knowing full well the dishonesty of the media when they’re trying to rile people up, and knowing how this sort of thing could effect the careers of not only the teacher, but the administration, I would have declined to interview.
 
The appropriate way to handle a student doing nothing wrong is to assign them an extra paper?
 
Well, that’s your choice. I think this is definitely a newsworthy story, because I think both the media and Catholics in general are too quick to hide any discrimination against them under a bushel basket, or ignore that it happened. The world needs to know that even in 2019 there are people out there who are ignorant about Catholicism or intolerant of it. And we need to stand up for our rights in a kind, but firm way. I think this family accomplished that goal very well.

Someone else might make a different decision for a variety of reasons, for example if they felt it was not in their particular child’s best interest to be the centerpiece of a news story. Kids are also all different. This boy handled the interview pretty well. Not all kids can or should be doing that.
 
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I tend to believe that if anti-Catholic discrimination was a real problem, there would be genuine examples of it to discuss and embellishment and fabrication (Such as claiming a teacher said she’d never read the constitution.) would not be necessary. I look around and I see people, desperate for attention, acknowledgment, their own official victim card, or something, pulling bizarre stunts like hiring people to beat them up and writing homophobic slurs on a cake and trying to pin it on some random store clerk. I’d like to believe we are above such things.
 
What’s their consolation prize for having to write an extra assignment for having the nerve to have a different faith?
 
Peeps said:
In our city, only 13"% of public school students achieve the MINIMUM math competency scores on standardized tests, and only 17% achieve the MINIMUM reading competency scores on standardized tests. I realize that these students come from appalling family situations
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Yes. Most of the time when you see a “good” school with good scores on state tests, you are looking at a school in an economically successful area (with higher property taxes to fund the school) with nice, middle class, stable families. When you see a “bad” school most of the time, you are looking at a school in an economically depressed area with lower incomes (and lower property taxes) and very unstable families.

Children from the latter cases often come to school several grades behind on reading levels. They can read, but they struggle to comprehend and analyze challenging texts. They sometimes do not have parents who are involved in their education and hold them accountable for studying and turning in work. And, at the high school level, sadly, they come from poor families where they may have to take jobs at a local fast foot restaurant or a grocery store after school just to help their families make it.

I see some of my students working at 8 or 9 o’clock on school nights, and I think no wonder they’re failing US history.
Peeps said:
but surely the teachers KNOW this when they take the job of “teacher,” don’t they? Surely they don’t expect a whole classroom of Laura Ingalls Wilders, do they?
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Know what? That when you become a teacher prepare to have a class of 30 kids out of control, disrespectful, always talking, always throwing pencils and other implements at each other, always on their cell phones, and never disciplined properly by your sorry administration?

I graduated high school in 2008. I got my first teaching job in 2015. The difference in how students behave now vs. then is profound. When I was in school, the only out of control classes I was ever in were taught by foreign teachers from India.

I teach in the same high school I graduated in and the kids act nothing like the kids I went to school with. They are more apathetic, more disrespectful to authority and, judging by the lack of interest in open house nights, they have parents who are less interested in overseeing their educations. When I was in high school, I was taking honors and AP classes. My idea of what school was like was probably somewhat distorted, but I stand by my observations that something has radically changed in the way students behave in schools.

Part of it is the smart phones. They are of the devil. The larger part, I believe, is the sorry parenting. We have parents who are more interested in being liked by their kids. We have parents who don’t even know where their kids are at any given moment. I sat in on a meeting with a student and the parents walked in and asked their child where had he been for the past few days!

Yes, blame the teachers and schools if you must. We often deserve it. Remember, though, there is more than enough blame to go around.
 
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Yes, you seem to think that “extra credit” is a reasonable consolation for being made to do an extra report when you haven’t done anything wrong. If a student already has an A, the extra credit isn’t worth anything to them.
 
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