BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Sometimes it seems judges are from Mars and criminal defendants are from Venus. The former may do all he or she can to send a message, but the latter just doesn't get it.
This week, in the case of Christopher Mushrush, the message got through.
Judge Robert Ruehlman sentenced him to 10 1/2 years in prison for assault and inducing panic after he released a chemical irritant at an Oak Hills High School variety show. The severity of the sentence made it clear courts believe schools are meant to be safe spaces. Anyone who threatens their sanctity is going to pay for his error in a big, big way.
Those of us who send people we love off to a school applaud the sentence. We also applaud police officers who come down hard on violent students, prosecutors who file appropriately severe charges and juries who follow up with fitting penalties.
But the judicial arena is where the solution to school violence ends, not where it starts.
It starts back when Dick met Jane and ran into Flip. It starts with cubbies and juice breaks.
It starts around dinner tables, in back yards, on T-ball fields. And it starts with parents and grandparents, Cub Scout leaders and Sunday School teachers.
Indeed, this wave of school violence will end only when those people send as clear and unequivocal a message as Judge Ruehlman. Which is not happening now.
Some send wrong message
Now, some adults are sending their children the message that sometimes rule-breaking or violence is necessary, unavoidable or excusable. Ask any gathering of teachers, and you're sure to find some who have seen parents try their darndest to get their kids off the hook.
You're saying my kid took a knife to the school bus seats, damaged a computer, threatened his teacher, threw the first punch? Not my kid. Or (better yet): Prove it.
Some parents stand up for civil behavior -- unless it requires their paying a price. The school wants to make their teen-ager responsible for damages? Then there's no evidence she did it. The school has a mandatory expulsion rule for fighting? He must have been provoked.
The school wants to impose an after-school detention, or a Saturday school? Then he can't serve it because there's nobody available to pick him up. Or it's just not (do you believe this?) convenient.
There's a word for this behavior. It's called undermining.
Parents undermine discipline, academic standards and social order in schools all the time, beginning in the most subtle ways. The school day runs from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.? Well, my daughter is going to leave for her flute lesson at 2:45. There's a rule that children must bring back library books, or they're forbidden to go to the library? Not my kid. I pay taxes. Returned books or not, my kid goes.
Increasingly, parents are not only bending the rules, they're breaking them in such a flagrant and insulting manner that it compromises the entire school culture. It's not rare to walk into a school office and find parents screaming and pounding their fists on the counter. Hang out at a sporting event and see how often parents are the ones hurling obscenities at referees and coaches.
Across all ines
This happens everywhere, in schools in every kind of neighborhood, to children of every color and economic background. It's just that some people say upscale, professional parents happen to do it better.
So they win a string of petty victories. They'll get their kid out of the detention, the extra laps, the restitution of lab equipment. They'll bluff their way past a principal or two, intimidate a superintendent.
But one day it will catch up with them. Their kid will keep hold of the small change, but end up paying the big price. He'll get out of the detentions, but one day he'll do time.
That's when they'll ask, "How did this happen?" And when the rest of us will explain, "It happened in first grade, and fifth grade, and ninth grade. It happened one small rule at a time."
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
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