Helicopters Abound For Students

Last week, I posted about helicopter parents and the technology that feeds their habit. This week, it is Helicopter Administrators in schools.

A culture of control has Washington area campuses in an ever-tightening grip, many students say, extending beyond the long-standing restrictions on provocative clothing, cellphone use and class-time bathroom visits. Akin to the omnipresent "helicopter parents," these students say, are helicopter administrators who home in on their smallest moves, no matter how guileless or mundane.

Some administrators acknowledge that the list of rules meant to ban, limit or deter potentially inappropriate or dangerous actions is steadily growing.

"Where to start? It's getting huge," said Linda Wanner, a Blair assistant principal. "The word of the day is prevention. We're on high alert all the time." It's a result, experts say, of the many pressures on those who lead a modern campus with anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 teenagers and the potential for violence or a lawsuit around every hallway corner.

while the litigiousness of American society is no doubt behind some of the rather inane rules, there is a another driver: No Child Left Behind. NCLB mandates that schools are responsible not only for the grades and test scores of their students, but also their safety as well.

School officials say they are more risk-averse than ever in a security-conscious era. They can face wrathful parents, legal threats and, worst of all, the specter of a school shooting.

Compounding the pressure, the federal No Child Left Behind law holds schools accountable for not only performance but also safety, requiring states to report the number of "persistently dangerous" schools. Even when there's only slight potential for harm, schools implement ordinances that seem inexplicable to students. At Blair, students hate being ordered to remove backpacks from cafeteria tables at lunch. "I can't think of a reason for it," said Spencer Bonar, 16.

The backpack rule is based on hygenics--have seen how nasty and dirty those packs get?

At any rate, Helicopter administrators result from the pressures from parents, politicians and the public to control the students. The result is an environment full of rules, some of which may be contradictory to the students themselves, which are never fully explained or reconciled with each other.

Admittedly, when thinking of 1,000 to 3,000 hormonally-addled, impulse control deprived teenagers in one place, resorting to a series of behavioral rules is clearly not unreasonable. But the problem appears to originate not in the schools, where some helicopter administrator fears are justified (I don't want to think about school shootings), but in the home. Some parents have become so busy themselves or overly protective (the helicopter parents) that they pressure the schools to take steps that 20 years ago were not necessary. At teh same time, these parents over-indulge their children, telling them they are so special that rules for other children don't apply to them. The result is a teeming mass of students for whom flauting the rules is not only teenage behavior but at least tacitly approved of by the parents, who will swoop in when things get tense as the school.

In short, if there were more rules at home, there would be no need for more rules in school.