When I was in high school, the police illegally body searched my entire school as a racist flex after tackling, beating and tasing a student over a pack of cigarettes one foot outside the door of my math class. A student responded by filming them and handing it over to a local news station, who ran the story and footage.

To retaliate, the next day administrators had metal detector wands waiting for us right off the busses, took every single cellphone they found and locked them up at the school board office for the rest of the year.

That school was absolute hell, a battleground between students and teachers. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that being spotted outside your classroom was an immediate expulsion, with not even enough time between classes to pee or use your locker (two minutes, we had to run). As part of the escalation, the fire alarm began being pulled at least twice a day. Any student who had even a moment alone with one would pull it immediately. Absolute chaos and a direct result of power collapse due to a racist, authoritarian school board that only knew how to wield institutional violence.

For this reason, my kid will always have a phone in order to protect themselves from administrative abuse. I will fight for that tooth and nail. I had over 40 write-ups in just elementary school for refusing entertain abuse from authoritarian staff, and I'll be a failure if my kid doesn't walk the same path.

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1718627440 5 days ago | parent [-]

Wow, US schools sound like prisons.

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soulofmischief 5 days ago | parent [-]

This was probably in the top ten worst high schools in the country. It was the worst high school in my state, which I attended a semester after attending the best public high school in my state, so I really got to see the wide gamut of education available in my state. And my state floats between the 1st-3rd worst ranked in the US for education, so it was truly a bottom-of-the-barrel experience.

Each time you'd walk into class, it was a dice roll if another piece of equipment had been stolen. We stopped buying and using projectors because any new ones got stolen within days. Sometimes I'd walk into class and every single piece of furniture had been completely turned upside down. Students would play on their phones, yell, throw things at the teachers, and the teachers would just ignore them.

It was also an extremely racially charged situation which had a big impact. I think there were less than ten white people in the school, the rest of the school was black, and a handful of hispanic folk.

The white people were almost all racist, and so apart from my neighbor, I only hung around black people. As the only white person there who hung out with non-white people, my nickname across the entire high school somehow became Tarzan, in part due to my long hair. When I'd walk down the halls each day, people would beat their chests and make ape noises and give me dap.

I'll never forget being at an award ceremony and walking up for a few awards, each time the entire student body would start stomping in the bleachers and making jungle noises and shouting my nickname. The visibly perplexed administration had no idea what was going on.

Because my credits would not cleanly transfer to their curriculum, I had two free periods each day and used this time to help out the administration and teaching staff, running errands, organizing, doing paperwork, etc. This allowed me to interface often with the school board, who was... entirely comprised of white, racist, old men. Men who fundamentally refused to understand the predicament facing the student body, and who were too eager to escalate instead of finding a way to bridge communication between the student body and faculty. Instead of empowering students, they saw them all as future bodies for the prison and service industry, and it was obvious. Students learned nothing, but would get straight A's. They would of course absolutely fail state and national standardized tests. They were shoved through the meat grinder with nothing to show for it.

	▲	1718627440 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Wow, I realized all the horrific stories came from a single person. You had a truly sad childhood. I am sorry, hopefully things are better now. However maybe you can be the change you want to see. Maybe you want to become a police man?