A kindergarten teacher and administrators at her school will face charges of misconduct later this month for allegedly ordering a student to remove her clothes as part of a search for stolen money.
The Oregon, Wis., school board suspended its search policy at a emergency meeting last month and ordered the hearing. A lawyer for the student’s parents has called for the teacher’s dismissal.
No disciplinary action has been taken against the Brooklyn Elementary School teacher, Joyce Garner, a district official said.
The parents’ attorney, John McManus, said the girl and another student were studying alone in a classroom when Ms. Garner returned to the room and discovered $6 missing from her purse.
The girl, according to the lawyer, told the teacher that the other student had taken the money.
Jerald Zibell, the school’s principal, authorized Ms. Garner and a secretary to take the student to a locker room for a “strip search.” When the search failed to turn up the money, the lawyer said, the other student admitted taking it.
The March 9 incident is being investigated by the Green County sheriff’s office.
They are getting ready to store the ashtrays and post the “no smoking” signs in the Mt. Pulaski school district in Illinois.
The school board voted 4 to 3 recently to ban smoking--by anyone, anytime, and any place on school property--beginning next fall.
Thomas Ohler, an ex-smoker who sponsored the resolution, said, “The motivation was simply that passive smoking is just as harmful as real smoking and we’re setting a bad example for the children.”
More than 50 students at a West Virginia high school staged a walkout last month to protest what they said was an unnecessarily strict disciplinary policy. As a result, they were suspended for three days.
Garry Tenney, the principal of Philip Barbour High School in Philippi, said that only “a very small minority” of the school’s nearly 1,000 students was involved in the protest and an earlier one.
A group of parents told the Barbour County Board of Education that Mr. Tenney should be dismissed. They said the principal acted arbitrarily and did not listen seriously to the students’ side of disciplinary cases.
But Mr. Tenney said that in suspending the students he was only applying the disciplinary code described in a student handbook, and thus was following school-system policy.
Mr. Tenney said that only one student has been expelled during his four years as principal.
A rural California high school near Fresno will be the first in the state to require students to maintain a C average over four years to earn a diploma, according to Wesley Stewart, superintendent of the Exeter Union High School District.
A panel of teachers, school-board members, and administrators at Exeter Union High School has also voted to increase the number of academic periods per day from five to six, Mr. Stewart said.
Starting with next fall’s freshman class, students will be required to take four years of English instead of three; four years of social studies instead of two; and two years each of science and mathematics instead of one.
Mr. Stewart said that parents--and even students of junior-high-school students--have expressed “nothing but support for the new program.’'
