JamesZ emailed me about the Life Of The Law article and audio Life of the Law #26 – School Discipline program which he had heard on WGBH. I think this was originally aired on January 28, 2014

About ten days after Kyle’s arrest, there was a disciplinary hearing with the assistant superintendent.

”She just kept saying, ‘well, you know what Kyle?’” Lisa Thompson remembered, “‘You seem like a nice kid and your mom seems like she really cares’ and she kept saying, ‘You are exactly the kind of kid we want at Harrison. Your mom is exactly the kind of parent we want at this school.’

“She said that, I don’t know, five times,” Thompson continued. And she said, ‘unfortunately Mom, I’m going to have to tell you something you don’t want to hear…I’m going to have to, I’m going to have to expel him for 180 school days.’”

I try to always maintain the proper amount of skepticism. I know that the story is edited to make you come to one conclusion, so I have to remind myself that we don’t really know what happened. I can still be outraged at the fact that something like this could have happened even though we don’t know for sure whether or not it happened this way in this instance.

This story is relevant to Sturbridge residents because it was just a few years ago that Town Meeting struggled with the issue of funding a school resource officer for Tantasqua Regional High School. At the time, I was in favor of funding the officer, but that is not what the town decided to do. In my mind, I bought into the worry of the bad things that could happen that might be mitigated by the presence of the SRO. It never occurred to me that there could be negative consequences to having an SRO. The above radio program certainly makes it clear what those bad consequences are. The bad consequences of having an SRO aren’t nearly as rare as the consequences of not having one. Having the students get to know a police officer from daily interaction or at least his presence in the school might actually be overrated according to these statistics. Interestingly, the problem is not with the police officer, but it is with the teachers and administrators. Having an SRO and a school administration with zero tolerance policies are a toxic mix.

There are a number of my friends in Sturbridge who have disagreed with my thinking on the SRO. I just could not understand their issues. Now I have a much better grasp of what they may be thinking. For those friends, I used to agree with on this issue, sorry, I have now switched sides.

June 6, 2015

I have found the following in the platform on Jacob Ryan’s web site as a member of the Tantasqua School committee.

I am proud to stand with a bipartisan group of people in support of a School Resource Officer at Tantasqua. The Democratic controlled state legislature and the conservative NRA agree, having an officer in a school system is to the benefit of all involved, especially the students.

Burgess Elementary has proved that an officer not only acts as a safety mechanism if something were to occur, but is a resource for the students, staff, and parents that helps strengthen the relationship between the community and law enforcement. The debate is over however, the state now requires us to have an officer on campus. And because I believe strongly in this issue and want to work within state law, I will push for the institution of this officer as soon as possible.

If the Town is required by the state to have an SRO, I think the least we can do is to also have a funded defense lawyer to protect the civil rights of any student accused of a crime for which the SRO gets involved. This defense lawyer must be called in immediately to warn the student of her or his Miranda rights. I’d like to see the state law amended to require this along with the SRO. I’d also like the school to be required to keep statistics on how many arrests get made, and the outcomes of these arrests and also keep track of the race and the LGBT status of the accused.

When we get into criminal matters, it is a very very bad idea for an accused person to say anything to anybody, especially a police officer, without the accused’s having legal counsel present. Otherwise, the accused is being taken advantage of and is being denied her or his rights. This is one lesson that ought to be taught at Tantasqua. After all, it is part of our Constitution.

See my previous post Don’t Talk To The Police.

June 6, 2015

Jacob Ryan >responded on Facebook.

Intriguing post, one correction though. Sturbridge has always stood by the funding for the resource officer. Every attempt to strip the funding at town meeting has failed. We currently fund the position at Burgess and Tantasqua but the Tantasqua school committee has not adopted the position. Sturbridge is for the position.

Truth Out has the article Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course.

Yes, fat is the problem. But it’s not the fat you eat that’s the problem. It’s the fat that your liver makes when overwhelmed with a huge sugar load!

I am thrilled to see this article. It explains exactly what I have wanted to know since we just switched from a low fat diet to a low carb diet. Sharon will be thrilled when she sees the article, too.

Ever since my heart attack in 1988, I have been on a low fat diet. After a heart bypass surgery in about 2007, the detailed reasons for a low fat diet were reinforced for us in the rehab course that I went through.

When we were living in Oregon before the bypass, I railed at the fact that a friend’s orthopedic surgeon wife was going on a low carb, all the fat you want diet. How could a doctor who should know better do this? Well, “Oops, my bad!”

For the last few years our doctors have been warning us that our blood sugar levels have been a little higher than they would like to see. While we were in a hospital gift shop waiting for an appointment that I had, we found a little book on low carb diets. It seemed to fit right in with our need to lower our blood sugar.

When you cut out carbs, fat, and salt, what the heck is there left to eat? Our typical cereal and toast breakfast added up to around 55 grams of carbs. This is after we had already eliminated orange juice because of the sugar. The only thing we could eat that satisfied us was bacon and eggs and one piece of lower carb bread. That’s about 10 grams of carbs instead of 55 grams. All these years we had been avoiding those two items like the plague. The book is what gave us the “permission” to make this change.

However, I wondered how this could fit in with what I had been prescribed for my heart health. The book gave a little indication of what had been wrong with that advice, but I still felt a tug from opposite directions.

One of the nurses that took care of me after a recent kidney stone removal operation told me that I should ask my primary care doctor for a nutrition consultation. That was on my todo list, when this article fell into my lap.

I may still get that consultation, but this article seems to reconcile what seemed to be two opposing recommendations.

The result of our being on this low-carb diet for about two weeks or so, is the loss of about 10 or more pounds for each of us, and a lowering of our blood-sugar down to within safe limits. In Oregon, Sharon had been diagnosed as a pre-diabetic, so she already had all the blood sugar monitoring equipment. Her fasting blood sugar level is now well below the level where doctors will take note of it anymore. I measured my blood sugar level only once since being on the diet, and I am now safely below the threshold, too.

Now remember, this medical advice is worth exactly what you paid for it, and not a penny more.