FOLIO
The new code of conduct for Duval COUNTY Public Schools is out, and it’s a Duval doozy.
The first rule of Duval County Public Schools is: You don’t talk about Duval County Public Schools.
LOL; JK.
As Dr. Vitti put it.
“There will be more aggressive consequences for multiple fighting,” he said to the Florida Times-Union. “If a student is involved in three fights, they will go to alternative schools,” such as Grand Park Career Center.
Code of conduct changes include a points system, in which brawls, booze, and narcotics violations, aggregated, will eventually lead to a student ending up in an alternative school.
Speaking of alternative schools: It’s only been since May when two girls were shot on a school bus as they rode home from one.
“When we think of a school bus, it symbolizes the innocence of youth,” Vitti told WJXT at the time. “It’s another example that violence is rampant in our community. Our children can’t be children,” he said.
While it is undeniable that violence is rampant in our community, it is equally undeniable that these alternative schools are about as far away from the “innocence of youth” as you can get.
By the time a kid ends up tracked to an alternative school, he has likely “acted up” multiple times. Those times include incidents that count against a demerit system, the times when a teacher might have given the benefit of the doubt, and the times when a teacher realized it might be more trouble than it’s worth to report an issue — which I’m told happens frequently.
The question, though, is why the kid acts up. Bad home life? Any home life? Is there a father in the house or a “caretaker” or an “uncle”? What’s the mother up to? Is the grandma raising the kid? Et cetera.
There are problems that government can solve. But school teachers in our day and age cannot raise the kids in their charge. There is way, way too much other stuff to deal with.
The code of conduct is not perfect. But something had to be done. And, despite the best efforts and intentions of all involved, something else will have to be done.
Another initiative that Superintendent Nikolai Vitti is linked to also involves the mayor, the sheriff, and the state attorney.
From Aug. 17 to 24, those parties and other “stakeholders” will embark on the “One City. One Jacksonville … Leadership Week for Young Men” academy.
Bishop John Guns is running this program, via Operation Save Our Sons. One hundred at-risk kids will spend a week being, as Guns calls it, “exposed to the city.” They’ll spend time with Mayor Lenny Curry, who has repeatedly voiced his commitment to at-risk youth. Spend time at the Police Memorial building (“not in handcuffs,” as Guns put it). And with State Attorney Angela Corey, who will “feed them and spend time with them.”
It’s so easy to come up with snark here. I know people reading this are doing so, but what this represents is the establishment in this city attempting to bridge a gap decades, centuries in the making.
And it’s not an easy journey. Guns mentioned at the press conference last Wednesday that Curry and Sheriff Mike Williams were taking a “risk” to “stand with us in this way, at this level.”
Guns didn’t specify what that risk was. No one ever does. Because to actually identify the risk being taken would be to say too much about our local culture, with its divisions made of barbed wire, with its unspoken understanding that the tale of two cities that is Jacksonville is one of the color line.
I asked Curry about the risk.
“Whatever the perceived risk,” Curry said, “this is the right thing to do.”
“Whatever it takes, I’m all in,” the mayor continued, as the room erupted in applause.
It was a great answer. It was real. But it wasn’t the full answer.
The risk is twofold. Sure, there’s a risk in reaching across the racial divide, which encompasses Axe Handle Saturday and segregated schools and neighborhoods that went from thriving to dying, especially once crack took over. A divide which encompasses places like Grand Park and much of Northwest Jax with infrastructure from the Lou Ritter days.
The risk is also in being able to tell folks in Ortega and San Marco and Queen’s Harbour that Jacksonville has an obligation to right historic wrongs. The risk is in committing to that process, even if it means the right wing curses your name. Let them curse. They’ve got nowhere else to go.
People don’t want to hear how things really are. People want to hear #AllLivesMatter. They want to pretend that there is true equal opportunity. That disparity of outcomes isn’t due to grievous historical inequities.
We have “at-risk youth” because society has failed, and not just in the short term. They are at-risk because their schools, their neighborhoods, and their role in the economic structure conspire to put them at risk.
Addressing that issue is the single most important challenge the Bold New City of the South faces.
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