Tough love or too tough?

From the Press-Telegram:

Tough love or too tough?
Dad punishes son for vandalism by making him advertise his offense
By Pamela Hale-Burns, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/16/2008 09:33:49 PM PST


With his father keeping an eye on him, Dennis Baltimore Jr. walks along Cherry Avenue at Willow wearing the sign advertising his vandalism at Wilson High School. The teen must also perform chores at the school during the winter break. (Scott Smeltzer/Staff Photographer)Cruel and unusual punishment or just good, old-fashioned discipline?

Dennis Baltimore Jr. was caught vandalizing school property at Long Beach's Wilson Classical High School.

He was sentenced by his dad to walk the streets of Long Beach and Signal Hill on Tuesday for five hours in two locations wearing a sign saying, "I am a juvenile delinquent who should be punished. I have wasted your tax money with dumb acts of vandalism in the public schools."

When Dennis Baltimore Sr.'s phone rang Monday, he didn't know the call from his son's school would cost $875, the price of the vandalism.

"In a time of this uncertain economy, I'm sure the public is not going to like it," he said. "So one way I am going to discipline him is to have him walking around with a sign stating his crime."

Baltimore Sr., who works in the engineering department of DirecTV, moved to California a few years ago from Washington, D.C., where he worked for CNN and Fox News. He has a three-day assignment to do video for Fox News for the presidential inauguration in January.

The father got the sign idea from a news story of an unemployed man in New York who recently advertised his resume on a board and walked the streets in search of a job.

"I didn't come up with this idea myself. I want to thank the guy in New York," he said. "When I saw that, I went to the store, bought the supplies and made the sign."

According to his dad, the 10 th-grader was trying to get attention when he painted graffiti of a fictitious gang on school property.

"I was thinking about being a gangbanger, but once I saw what the punishment was, I was like, no," Baltimore Jr. said.

The 16-year-old also cringed from the attention his punishment drew as onlookers laughed, pointed and took pictures while reading the sign.

"I want him to feel all of those things because I want him to always question himself before he makes a decision," his father said. "You have to make conscious decisions. He's a good son; he just made a bad decision, and he has to pay for it."

Baltimore Sr. encourages other parents to take the steps to make a positive difference in their children's lives.

"I'm a concerned parent. I'm frustrated, and I'm sure I'm not alone," he said. "I'm sure there are some other parents who want to take actions like this and I encourage them to do it."

The father knows there will be those who will disagree with the discipline, but he feels that it will change his son's view of responsibility.

"I'm doing what I have to do to make him a man. That's my job," he said. "This is nothing compared to what could happen to him. He could get shot in the streets for something he thinks is minor."

Onlookers agreed.

"It's not harsh; I think it's pretty decent," said Ted Ybarra. "It's a way of disciplining him, for him to be embarrassed and show people what he did wrong."

Baltimore Jr. was suspended for four days, and as part of the school's punishment, he will spend several days of his holiday vacation doing community service at Wilson. He will be painting over graffiti and doing other chores assigned by the school.

"He has to understand that there are consequences and reactions," his father said. "This is a negative reaction."

Another passerby, Adrian Paxton - released from prison in October - believes the punishment will help keep the younger Baltimore out of even worse trouble.

"He won't want to do that again," he said. "And it's better than his dad putting his hands on him and beating him."

Something as simple as a father's involvement could make a major difference in a child's life, Paxton said.

"If my dad had did something like that to me when I was doing my thing, it probably would have helped me," he said.

Spectators' responses helped drive home the father's point.

"He looked embarrassed," said Briana McCoy. "I think he's learned his lesson."

And they just may be right.

"Right now I feel dumb and I regret everything I've done," Baltimore Jr. said. "I know my little sister is going to follow me and I'm going to tell her no."

"I want him to realize this is a crime and he had to answer to that," Baltimore Sr. said. "I want kids to know that what they do, even if they think it's small, there are consequences. This is a felony crime in California."

Although it wasn't his first time vandalizing, the teen said it will definitely be his last.

"I'm really mad, confused and I feel dumb at the same time, but I understand what my dad is saying," he said. "I know he wants me to learn how to be a man and step up to my mistakes and learn by being punished. I did it, but I'm going to do better now. It's not worth it.

"I'm done."

Me?

This is nothing but good, OLD SCHOOL parenting.

If the son was so bad and 'tough', then be ' tough' walking around, telling folks what you did.

This is about SHAME. SHAME worked a great deal ' back in the day'.

This young man is lucky he has a father that cares.

School Discipline Tougher on African-Americans

Hat tip: Booker Rising

School discipline tougher on African Americans
By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent
September 25, 2007

AUSTIN, Texas - In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.

In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites.

In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended.


Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America's public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.

In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population. In 21 states—Illinois among them—that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.

No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less.

Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found. Some impoverished black children grow up in troubled neighborhoods and come from broken families, leaving them less equipped to conform to behavioral expectations in school. While such socioeconomic factors contribute to the disproportionate discipline rates, researchers say that poverty alone cannot explain the disparities. "There simply isn't any support for the notion that, given the same set of circumstances, African-American kids act out to a greater degree than other kids," said Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University whose research focuses on race and discipline issues in public schools. "In fact, the data indicate that African-American students are punished more severely for the same offense, so clearly something else is going on. We can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism."

Rest of the story is here:

This is another one of those ' Duh' moments. Nothing in this story is any kind of new news for Black folk. Only in black and white newsprint what we already knew. We've seen it, time and time again, Black children being punished with a greater severity than other groups.