What are we teaching by example?

An empty institution. (Image by elizabethaferry)

This week, a student at North Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta, was suspended for five days. Her crime was posting pictures and video on social media in violation of school policy.

These pictures and video just happened to show packed hallways at North Paulding High School. The superintendent of Paulding County School District, Brian Otott, defended the school’s reopening efforts in response to widespread attention to, and criticism of, NPHS students’ apparent lack of social distancing and mask use as shown in the photos. In a letter to parents, Otott sought to provide additional “context” for the photos, saying, “Under the COVID-19 protocols we have adopted, class changes like this may happen, especially at a high school with more than 2,000 students.”

In other words, things are going exactly according to plan. A clip of a Paulding County Board of Education meeting from this past May shows Otott patiently listening while a board member, Jeff Fuller, expresses a desire to “start back normal.” Fuller goes on to dismiss the CDC guidelines for schools as “complete crap” and anything that would prevent a normal school reopening as “hype.”

Jeff Fuller wanted Paulding County to “lead the way in an absolute normal return to normal activities” starting August 3. That’s what happened, and that’s why the school district is the subject of conversation and criticism. That’s what you get when you lead the way.

The student who posted the pictures, Hannah, was also leading the way. And her school has a right to enforce its policies and punish her for that. However, it’s worth asking what this learning institution intends to teach by doing so. If the superintendent thought that the public outcry over these photos merited a letter to parents, might he have initiated a dialogue with Hannah herself and any other concerned students? Perhaps they could have provided valuable input as the administrators “step back and assess how things are going” during the remote learning days this week.

Hannah’s photos achieved what was presumably her desired result, which was to expose the conditions within her school and start a conversation about them. The superintendent’s response amounted to, “Yes, this was our plan, but things don’t look good, and we’re going to work on it.” Who knows whether the superintendent, who oversees 33 schools, would have even seen the conditions at NPHS unless Hannah had gone against school policy to share her photos. She provided useful documentation of problems that need to be solved at her school.

However, not only is Hannah being punished, the principal of NPHS, Gabe Carmona, threatened “consequences” for any student who posts anything “on social media that is negative in our light [sic] without permission.” So the problem is not actually that Hannah violated the school’s policies on phone and social media usage — the problem is that she made the school look bad. However, with Carmona’s stance, based not on principle but self-interest, the school doesn’t need her help in that department.

The school district (whose motto is “Engage. Inspire. Prepare.”) lost an opportunity to support an adolescent’s appropriate civil disobedience and channel it into a meaningful discourse. The high school is shutting down dissent, thus contradicting everything one might ever want to teach an adolescent about history, society, and civics. What can someone learn in such an institution? Follow the rules and don’t speak up? How does that prepare a person for participation in public life?

Students generally don’t have a choice about whether to attend their local high school. A public institution, funded by taxpayers, is going to be much better off engaging with its critics than shutting them down. And when those critics are fifteen years old, the school leaders have a profound opportunity to nurture and educate these students who care enough to face negative consequences for their actions.

I hope that the Paulding County School District is able to learn from the first few days of school and make adjustments. The blowback they received on social media may have lacked context, but the students who posted the pictures had plenty of legitimate context for their perspectives. Brian Otott publicly dismissed their feedback, but you can bet that he and his team will definitely take into account the photos of standstill hallway traffic when evaluating their coronavirus protocols.

I wonder if, as these administrators are working out the logistics of how to teach, they’ll consider what they’re teaching by example, especially to the girl who will be sitting at home serving out her suspension when her classmates return on Monday.