What's one way to protest a school lunch period that's too short? Get a bunch of friends together and pay for your lunch in pennies.
Then watch the school administrators overreact to this blatant disrespect by assigning detentions to the students.
Then watch the school administrators backpeddle as fast as they can, caught in the public eye looking like petty martinets.
Most student "protests" are pathetic. This was actually reasonably intelligent and directly related to their grievance. An excellent teachable moment here--but the administration immediately went into battle mode. Was there no one to talk sense into those people before they made fools of themselves?
5 comments:
This "protest" was aimed at the wrong people. The cafeteria workers and other students are not to blame for the short lunch period, but they were the ones inconvenienced by the penny payments. It seems really disrespectful of the cafeteria workers who likely don't get a lot of respect anyway, and who are powerless.
I understand that point of view, I just disagree with it.
WOW. This whole story gives me hope. It shows that at least there are some students that can think for themselves. Sometimes I think that school administrators treat students as cattle, and that it doesn't really how much they learn, as long as they do well enough on state tests.
Lindsey
Not only was the protest well thought out, but the school administration (in typical bureaucratic knee-jerk fashion) confirmed the validity of the students' plaint in a grand show of its ineptitude.
Even the dimmest of lunchroom monitors could have figured out that children are perfectly capable of piling pennies into neat stacks of 25 for easy counting. But instead these multiply-degreed educators were stumped -- angrily lashing out at a bunch of pimply-faced kids.
I have to admit that in 1970, I helped lead a protest against my junior high's cafeteria. They had raised the prices by 50%, reduced the food and made the lines so slow due to understaffing, that students often wouldn't make it through the line until after their lunch period was over. We organized and NOBODY bought lunch for three days. The administration met with us, they listened and they implemented a few fixes-although the food was really lousy and I always had a Coke and an order of fries from the snack bar instead. So much for my history of social protest.
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