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In reply to the discussion: South Carolina judge urges support for accused murderer Dylann Roof's family in bizarre court speech [View all]Igel
(35,362 posts)But I've seen too many parents on tv saying they didn't know where they went wrong or where their kid went wrong.
And I've watched kids vanish from my classroom, only to contact the parents. "I didn't know my kid wasn't attending." "I didn't know he was failing all his classes." "He dropped out when he could and I couldn't do anything." S. Carolina lets kids drop out when they reach their 17th birthday. One student worked hard to make peace with her parents; I last saw her the last day she was 17. On her 18th birthday, her friends said, she got up, got dressed, put her stuff in her car, withdrew from school and found an apartment.
Another girl dropped out of school when she turned 18. And moved in with her boyfriend, who was a few years older than her.
More than one set of parents has just said to let their kid fail. "Better he screw up his life now than when he's 25."
In some cases I simply couldn't find the parents. No Internet presence, their email addresses weren't working, their phones had changed or the kid had submitted data update cards that were willfully incorrect. In other cases I could only get through if I used my personal phone because the parents recognized the school's prefix.
And yet some of them continue to help their kid survive instead of becoming homeless and starving on the streets. Go figure, I guess some parents are just heartless bastards.
Of course, if it had gone the other way and they didn't help him--I'm assuming that they did here, but it's only an assumption--that would be the excuse for his behavior--his parents turned their backs on him. I had one kid who told me he would soon be turning 18 and his parents' birthday present for him was an empty U-Haul rental. His response was to get arrested and expelled from school two weeks before graduation. Catch-22. What's important is the blame.
I'm not going to sit in judgment of them until I know something about them. Even the Mullins guy who attended high school with him ... the high school Roof apparently attended through his sophomore year (he was a 9th grade repeater). That makes that guy's info what? Five years old? Like kids don't change from age 16 to 21.