You were saying in a round about way that they come to school for the free lunches or food, sell drugs, cause trouble and go home. Right?

well the new ways of the last 40 yrs. don't seem to be working out so well either.

The unruly ones are allowed to remain in a class and disrupt the learning process becasuse.... why again??

Same old same old. The state legislators get all the glory of being for "improvement" in education, and we local suckers get sore behinds. Last one out of NYS, please power the place down...

You can point out my spelling and grammatical errors,anytime. I try very hard to do both well, but sometimes I do make mistakes. After all it has been close to 40 yrs since I sit in an English class.

Let me recap: We need smaller classrooms because the teacher cannot handle more students because of the unruly ones.

The unruly ones are allowed to remain in a class and disrupt the learning process becasuse.... why again??

Therefore, in order to cater to those who are disruptive we need to decrease class size and hire more teachers which costs more.

Um... what's wrong with this picture?

When i went to school, there were routinely 30+ kids in the class but given the discipline standards of the Catholic school nuns, that wasn't a problem. Anyone see a correlation here?

Okay. It should be "sat".

I feel the same way. I try to do as well as I can, and, like you, usually do okay. I don't mind positive criticism either; it can only help me.

See? This is the problem. What you want is the standards that you were brought up with applied to the classrooms of today. Standards that worked in their time because the *parents* and families of the disruptive students stood in lock step with teachers and principals and held their own children accountable. I went to school at a time when those standards were in place as well. The "discipline" that was doled out at school was nothing compared to that which we faced when we got home if we had done something wrong. And the system worked well for most kids.

Well, you can bit@h and moan all day long about how "wrong" things are now. You can scream about how "we're just not holding people accountable" like we used to. And you'd be right as rain all day long. But the point is that it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how right you are. The *fact* is that schools do NOT have the ability to create the kind of accountability that existed in days gone by. School can NOT force parents to take responsibility for the actions of their children. You can't MAKE a parent show up at school and cooperate with teachers and administrators so that they're effective partners in the education of their children. And when a kid disrupts the educational process for others to the point where they are removed from class or put on short or long-term suspension (which happens ALL THE FREAKIN' TIME in Geneva, despite what little information some seem to have to the contrary), then the school is REQUIRED BY LAW to provide for the continuing education of that kid-whether it be in school of outside of the building. Nobody gets to choose which kids receive an "education." We are FORCED to work with every single kid that is of age, regardless of their behavior, their academic aptitude, the lack of cooperation of their families, whether or not they walk in the door ready to beat the crap out of another student or a teacher, got the crap beat out of them the night before, or whatever their circumstance might be. None of that stuff matters. The job remains the same for every single kid.

And if anybody actually believes the old BS line of logic that says "Well, there were kids that came from bad families back when I was in school, but we still made it work," just drop it. There is *NO* *ZERO* *NOT EVEN A LITTLE* correlation or similarity between the way things used to be and the way they are now.

If you want things to change for the better, do two things: *Support* your local schools and start screaming for serious mandate relief at the state and federal level.

When i went to school, there were routinely 30+ kids in the class but given the discipline standards of the Catholic school nuns, that wasn't a problem. Anyone see a correlation here?

I would like to see all of the administration fired, their salaries used to hire staff that are working directly with the children, and then the principles divy up administrative responsibilities. Of course, that will never happen.

Lets see what kind of raise Dr Bob gives himself and the rest of the administration this year.... Because the past 2 years we have cut how many? 80ish staff? And all of the administration still recieved their raises...