Politics
This school’s response to school shootings should upset parents everywhere
The day after police say a 14-year-old was arrested Georgia’s Apalachee High Schoola radio report about that murderous attack began to play as I drove my 7th grader to school. She wanted to know if anybody had died. I said, “I think so,” deliberately avoiding giving her the details that two students and two teachers were dead. She had just recently participated in her school’s “See Something, Say Something” campaign and had recently had a lockdown drill, and I felt sick with the realization of how much she’s been forced to think about threats at school and what she’d do if one arose.
It was upsetting to hear what a Catholic school in Virginia Beach did when an 11-year-old told officials there that a classmate had brought a bullet to school.
That’s one of the reasons it was so upsetting to hear about what a Catholic school in Virginia Beach did when an 11-year-old 6th grader told officials there that a classmate had brought a bullet to school. He should have been effusively thanked for reporting what he saw. But in a move that epitomizes the trend in American schools of making innocent actors outlaws, the principal, who reportedly commended the boy, at the same time, punished him with a suspension. His waiting two hours for the opportunity to make the report anonymously, they said, was unacceptable and warranted punishment.
It filled me with a rage to think that our daughter, or anybody’s child, would be made to feel bad in such a situation.
Worse still, the boy who reported that his classmate had brought a bullet to school was given the same punishment — a 1-1/2 day suspension — as the boy who brought the contraband. To punish the boy who alerted school officials to a possible danger is by itself indefensible, but to give the other boy the same punishment renders their actions equivalent. It beggars belief that officials at St. John the Apostle Catholic School are acting as if they are.
But school officials and leaders of The Catholic Diocese of Richmond are defending their actions. “Failure to report a safety concern affects the safety of everyone in the school,” Leslie Winneberger, a lawyer for the diocesewrote in a letter obtained by The Washington Post. “… The school cannot, and will not, take chances when it comes to student safety, especially true in light of the school shooting in Georgia this past week.”
But thanking the boy who reported what he saw and using his delay as an opportunity to emphasize the importance of acting with urgency would not have represented the school taking chances. It would have been humane and gracious and in keeping with the school’s mission to provide a “Christ-centered learning environment” with a focus on students’ “moral development.”
What Christ-centered message is St. John the Apostle communicating here: that rain falls on the just and the unjust?
All schools have a role to play in students’ moral development. They should all foster — and at a minimum not impede — students’ discernment of good and bad and right and wrong.
All schools, not just religious ones, have a role to play in students’ moral development. They should all foster — and at a minimum not impede — students’ discernment of good and bad and right and wrong. But whether it’s pre-kindergarteners getting suspended for hugging or elementary students getting sent home for playfully shaping their fingers into a gunwe’ve witnessed a trend over the last couple of decades of school officials letting their fear of being sued justify their punishing undeserving students.
When you add those decisions to policies that criminalize certain hair stylesand demand that students eat lunch without talking to one another and remain just as quiet while walking the halls in perfectly straight linesthere seems at times to be a concerted effort in our country’s schools to stamp out any and every sign of young people’s humanity. And to replace their human-centered sense of right and wrong with the latest download from the school’s risk-management team.
Not only is punishing a boy who alerted school officials to his classmate’s bullet likely to give the entire student body a warped sense of ethics, as an attorney hired by his mother rightly points out, it sends students the message that they’d be “better off not saying anything,” as reported by the Post.
The last thing school officials should want is students who are fearful that reporting something suspicious will get them in trouble from school officials who say they took too long. For many students, the fear of getting in trouble — especially suspended — may be a the worst thing they can imagine. I was such a child, and I don’t think our daughter is much different. And while we may hope that a student who senses a threat rightly prioritizes school safety over fear of getting in trouble, the best way to encourage them to make that a priority is to remove from them the fear of getting in trouble.
Ironically, the boy waited till the end of a standardized test — which the educational establishment has succeeded in convincing students are all important — before he said anything.
For many students, the fear of getting in trouble may be the worst thing they can imagine.
The mother of the boy who told school officials what he knew says he wanted to make the report about the bullet quietly, “because one of the things he didn’t want was to be bullied and didn’t want to be labeled a ‘snitch,’” but because he and the other kid disappeared from their classroom at the same time and they served their suspensions simultaneously, his peers quickly figured it out.
Speaking of a warped sense of right and wrong, a North Carolina man was arrested after officials say he emailed a bomb threat to St. John the Apostle and caused officials to shut down school for two days. It should go without saying that nothing justifies threatening a school, and school officials are right to be angry at the threat.
But that arrest does nothing to address the anger from the mother of the boy who was wrongly suspended or ease the fears of parents who may fear that their school will adopt a policy just as wrongheaded as St. John the Apostle. We all want our children to be safe. But we don’t want them to be made out as villains if they try to keep their school safe but don’t do it quickly enough according to some ridiculously arbitrary standard.
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
CANBERRA — It was disappointment from start to finish around the USA vs. Australia match in the Bush Capital, won comfortably by the American side.
Neither of Canberra’s Socceroos made the starting lineup and the local government failed to provide an outdoor watch site for the match, despite a heavy social media campaign from locals. With federal politicians out of town and back in their districts this week, the campaign lacked star power and fell on deaf ears.
That left thousands to fill inner city pubs and the University of Canberra, which were allowed special trading hours for the match, from 4.30 a.m.
Australia’s politicians — vocal in their support in the lead-up to the match — went silent quickly, after Australia’s own goal 11 minutes minutes into the game.
If the Aussies’ lackluster performance left the crowd subdued, they found energy to boo Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a notably unpopular figure in Australia, which embraced harsh Covid lockdowns and vaccines — when he appeared on the match broadcast.
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