Danny Means Trouble

This is a story that I have very mixed feelings about. A new boy comes to school, Danny, and starts right off causing a lot of trouble in his classes. He gets into an actual fight but is not suspended. He just happens to be on the track team and is the best person on that team, and there's a big match coming up.

At the same time he is having trouble with his parents and he has a personal problem that causes him to have trouble reading. Elizabeth manages to get someone in sports to help him.

Thus, there is a reason, sort of, for him acting up, yet I still find two problems with what he is doing.

First, he actually gets into a physical fight at school. To me, that is an offense which should result in an automatic suspension of at least two weeks for the person who started the fight. This is a major problem in any classroom and violence of any kind should NOT be allowed in the classroom. There should be an actual zero tolerance policy for that. (Schools claim they have zero tolerance policies but many of them don't actually enforce the policy.)

Second, it seems that Danny's being an athlete is like having a free ticket to do whatever wants. Eventually he is sort of punished, but this is not sufficient for the number of times he has acted up in class and disrupted the class, thereby automatically doing at least some damage to the educational process. This also just reinforces the idea (and frequent practice) that school athletes are not held to the personal standards expected of the non-athletes.

So, as I said, I have quite mixed feelings about this story.


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