I was disheartened to read that Juneau students were not allowed back to class after their brief tribute to the 17 murdered Florida students. I applaud them for their heartfelt expression, and am disappointed that the school interpreted its policy so inflexibly.<\/p>\n
At times of tragedy, counselors have assisted our students in finding healthy ways of coping with overwhelming feelings. They encourage giving voice to feelings in a safe way. It seems to me these students were engaged in exactly the type of activity a counselor might have encouraged.<\/p>\n
We try to instill in our students an engagement with current events, a sense of civic duty and responsibility. These students appeared to be acting in concert with these teachings.<\/p>\n
Yes, policies should be applied uniformly and fairly, but a more nuanced approach easily could have made the students’ actions “policy compliant.” Could a teacher or the principal have accompanied the students? Could they have been asked to write or speak about the experience before and\/or after as a part of a lesson in writing, speech, government, civics, healthy lifestyles, etc.? It wouldn’t have taken long to find a number of solutions.<\/p>\n
The school failed to engage in the kinds of critical thinking and solution-seeking processes that we try to teach our students and that we desperately need in our society. It missed the “teachable moment.”<\/p>\n
Jan Gregg Levy,<\/strong><\/p>\n Juneau<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was disheartened to read that Juneau students were not allowed back to class after their brief tribute to the 17 murdered Florida students. I applaud them for their heartfelt expression, and am disappointed that the school interpreted its policy so inflexibly. At times of tragedy, counselors have assisted our students in finding healthy ways […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":14,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-24652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24652"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=24652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}