Texas Tickets Kids

[wilheldp_PE]

Washington Post Article

In a small courtroom north of Houston, a fourth-grader walked up to the bench with his mother. Too short to see the judge, he stood on a stool. He was dressed in a polo shirt and dark slacks on a sweltering summer morning.
“Guilty,” the boy’s mother heard him say.

He had been part of a scuffle on a school bus.

In another generation, he might have received only a scolding from the principal or a period of detention. But an array of get-tough policies in U.S. schools in the past two decades has brought many students into contact with police and courts — part of a trend some experts call the criminalization of student discipline.

As asinine as it is to tie up the court system with minor school discipline issues, that's not the part I found most infuriating about this article.

The fourth-grader who tussled on the bus was 10. After his appearance, his mother, Kimberly Smith, questioned whether her son belonged in court.
“I’m all for consequences, but I think it could have been handled another way,” she said. She had no chance to mention her son’s attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder, she said.

The child was ordered to do eight hours of community service and take classes in anger management and decision-making, at a cost of $370, Smith said. “I’m a single parent,” she said. “Four hundred dollars? I have two other boys.”

I am admittedly over-generalizing here, but single parenting (and sometimes being proud of that fact) is a cancer on the upcoming generation. Not only are these kids being neglected by only having one parent that is either living off of the government teet or working so many hours to support the household that they don't ever see their kids, but they are using that fact as a crutch to explain their terrible parenting skills. Then, the doctors come in and put fancy medical names on the kids basically acting like spoiled brats or unsupervised heathens. The doctors win because they get kickbacks for prescribing Ritalin, the parents win because they now have another excuse why their kid acts like an idiot, but the kids and society in general lose big time.