Should Schools Require School Uniforms?

Gang recruitment at an elementary school?  That’s just sad…

@Jermofoot:

Gang recruitment at an elementary school?  That’s just sad…

Yes, it is.  It also was happening.

We lived in a school district that was predominantly Mexican farm workers.  The cost of living is such that it would take 2 or more working adults, per bedroom, to pay the rent of the houses.  This meant a four bedroom house would have 8+ working adults with attendent children.  The adults would not be able to stay home and watch over the kids, so parenting falls to the oldest kids.  This lack of family structure encourages kids to find structure elsewhere and gangs provide that.

Add a language barrier, and legal status issues to the crushing poverty and it is a breeding ground for trouble.

Worth noting, is that the school uniform requirement was voted for by the parents of the children in school and is still “ratified” each school year by the new PTO.  In the midst of all this mess, there are a lot of people trying very hard to move up into the American Dream.  Quite a few made it through the door before the DotCom crash closed the door again.

This leads to a different set of observations…

We bought into that subdivision when the DotCom boom added a large number of new houses to the edge of what was otherwise a “barrio” school district.  I had transferred my “military industrial complex” skills over to “DotCom” skills and moved to CA from VA.  Our immediate neighborhood was all white collar, college educated (multi-cultural) familes but we made up < 10% of the school district population.  There was a lot of effort made to improve the neighborhood and the school district but it all came crashing down with the DotCom bust.

The first sign was multiple families moving into a single family dwelling.  The city refused to enforce zoning laws because they were “discriminatory”, according to the lady at City Hall.  When that happened around the corner from us, we sold.  It was obvious that the DotCom crash was going to change the neighborhood.  The buyer of our house presented themselves as a young couple with young kids.  After the sale finished, three more families with teenaged kids moved in with them.  Our four bedroom house had four families with 13 children (8 + 13 = 21) for 21 people in a house zoned for “single family dwelling”.  In less than six months, everyone we knew from that neighborhood had left.  The number of kids in the school district quadrupled, with no change in tax base for the school.

The real irony, for me, is although we made good money on that house (+150K) allowing us to move where we are now, home prices in that neighborhood are now depressed and many of the mortgages there are “upside down” with the value of the loan exceeding the value of the home.

The mortgage bubble of high risk loans to under qualified people, has caused its own problem by deflating the house values that were sustaining the bubble.  The under qualified borrower is forced to bring in boarders, which then lowers the value of the house, which then means the 3 to 5 year fixed / variable interest loan is a trap, not a stepping stone.  So the borrower goes under and the loan originator takes a loss on a house that now does not have the resale value due to the depressed neighborhood.  While I have sympathy for the under qualfied borrower, they signed on to a payment they could not make.  The loan originator set the borrower and them selves up.  Glad I jumped off that boat before it started sinking.

@Baghdaddy:

@Jermofoot:

Gang recruitment at an elementary school?  That’s just sad…

Yes, it is.  It also was happening.

We lived in a school district that was predominantly Mexican farm workers.  The cost of living is such that it would take 2 or more working adults, per bedroom, to pay the rent of the houses.  This meant a four bedroom house would have 8+ working adults with attendent children.  The adults would not be able to stay home and watch over the kids, so parenting falls to the oldest kids.  This lack of family structure encourages kids to find structure elsewhere and gangs provide that.

Add a language barrier, and legal status issues to the crushing poverty and it is a breeding ground for troubl

you shouldn’t make excuses.

@cyan:

@Baghdaddy:

@Jermofoot:

Gang recruitment at an elementary school?  That’s just sad…

Yes, it is.  It also was happening.

We lived in a school district that was predominantly Mexican farm workers.  The cost of living is such that it would take 2 or more working adults, per bedroom, to pay the rent of the houses.  This meant a four bedroom house would have 8+ working adults with attendent children.  The adults would not be able to stay home and watch over the kids, so parenting falls to the oldest kids.  This lack of family structure encourages kids to find structure elsewhere and gangs provide that.

Add a language barrier, and legal status issues to the crushing poverty and it is a breeding ground for troubl

you shouldn’t make excuses.

Not sure I understand what you mean.

@Baghdaddy:

@cyan:

@Baghdaddy:

@Jermofoot:

Gang recruitment at an elementary school?  That’s just sad…

Yes, it is.  It also was happening.

We lived in a school district that was predominantly Mexican farm workers.  The cost of living is such that it would take 2 or more working adults, per bedroom, to pay the rent of the houses.  This meant a four bedroom house would have 8+ working adults with attendent children.  The adults would not be able to stay home and watch over the kids, so parenting falls to the oldest kids.  This lack of family structure encourages kids to find structure elsewhere and gangs provide that.

Add a language barrier, and legal status issues to the crushing poverty and it is a breeding ground for troubl

you shouldn’t make excuses.

Not sure I understand what you mean.

your  creating excuses for their behavior for joining gangs by invoking a sympathy for them and  moving the responsibilty from the children to thier parents.

Just reporting the conditions.

Obviously not all the kids were becoming gang members so it is not something they were being forced into but the lack of parental supervision was not helping.

You are free to offer your own ideas on why we were seeing gang recruitment in 2nd grade.

@Baghdaddy:

gang recruitment in 2nd grade.

I think I saw that on an episode of Walker Texas Ranger once

I saw it in my sons 2nd grade class.

Not cool.

Yeah that sounds like a realy bad situation

The irony for me was it was cheaper to move to a better school district than send my kids to private school.