Our Focus In Schools Is Wrong

I just read about a Justice of The Peace in Texas, requiring truant students in her jurisdiction to wear ankle bracelets with a Global Positioning System ( G.P.S.) attached. This is a pilot program to try and keep up with students that are missing school for various reasons. Of course, their are objections to this course of action, and there will probably be more. This is being done to try to get students to realize that school is important.

Texas has requirements, as do other states that students have to go to school, and be there a certain number of days. The training offered in Texas is college preparatory, because the legislators of our great State believe that all students should go to college! Needless to say, we are not serving the needs of our kids. Many kids like the Judge is dealing with are just right for the hands on jobs needed in the future. They are ready for training now!

Our children, in Texas as well as other states, need technical skills as required by industry today. In Southeast Texas, the refineries are in dire need of workers who have skills in the construction fields as well as processor operators to work the chemical mixing operations. There are two huge building projects at the initial phase just for Motiva ( part of Shell Oil) and Texas Eastman. They don't need college graduates, but workers trained for operations! These companies are going into the high schools to help students with technical training. Time is of the essence as people say!

Lamar Technical in Beaumont, Texas offers such training as well as others. The plants doing the expanding can not get enough to train, yet we are continuing with the old college grad route in our high schools.

In my healthy opinion, we need to get off our pioused ass and began preparing all students for the future. Click on this link and look at the fields offered now for the petro-chemical fields alone!
http://www.lit.edu/

Dave

Truant Texas students to be tracked with GPS anklets.

The AP (8/23, White) reported that court authorities in San Antonio, Texas, "will be able to track students with a history of" truancy "under a new program requiring them to wear ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System (GPS) monitoring." Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said that she expects approximately 50 students "from four San Antonio-area school districts" to "wear the anklets during the six-month pilot program" announced last week. "Penn said students in the program will wear the ankle bracelets full-time and will not be able to remove them." According to the AP, "Penn will target truant students with gang affiliations, those with a history of running away and skipping school, and those who have been through her court multiple times." Penn said, "Students and parents must understand that attending school is not optional. ... When they fail to attend school, they are breaking the law." The AP noted that the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said that the program "raises privacy concerns."