On Wednesday afternoon, bizarre stories began emerging all over Carlsbad.
Kids being picked up by their parents at Calavera Hills School, a K-8 campus in the Carlsbad Unified School District, reported witnessing a chaotic protest on campus earlier in the day, with students shouting obscenities at Carlsbad Police, kids holding signs which read “F*CK ICE and anyone who voted for that man,” and countless students missing or late to class.
Elementary teachers struggled to explain the mayhem to their young students. Apparently, this wasn’t the annual Kindness Matters kickoff.
Then reports began coming in to other CUSD schools — miles away — of young kids wandering the streets of Carlsbad unsupervised. Staff from those schools set out across the city looking for the students, eventually locating a large group in the Village.
Where did they come from? Apparently, Calavera Hills.
After the protest, they simply walked off the campus without any objection (or supervision) from the principal or administration, as part of the “walkout” trend happening in high schools across the country.
Except Calavera Hills is an elementary/middle school: a secure, closed campus where students are not permitted to leave on their own.
A hastily-crafted email from the CHMS principal that afternoon laughably claimed that around 100 (11-13-year-old) students staged a “peaceful” protest and walkout completely on their own, and that the school “worked to balance students’ rights to free expression with our responsibility to maintain a safe, orderly and productive learning environment.”
Not only did they fail to balance these interests, but the reality is also that there is no “balance” to be had. Students’ rights to free expression end when their expression disrupts classroom instruction, as the Supreme Court explained in the landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines. Even the ACLU admits that a walkout is a disruption that subjects students to discipline.
But the only discipline parents reported involved students caught up in the mayhem who ended up late to class and were marked tardy or absent. The principal again claimed that some of the students who walked out had notified the school in advance, thereby obtaining an excused absence under a new state law allowing students to participate in civic activities for one day each year.
Once again, this explanation strains credulity. The “activity” was the campus protest, not an activity in the community. Students didn’t check out of the front office as they left — they hopped the back fence or walked out of the “secure” front gate.
Did their parents authorize the school to let them wander four miles into the Village during the middle of a school day?
We’ve already seen how badly this can go after a student was hit by a car during a walkout in Florida. Adults in California may be charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors by encouraging walkouts.
After the principal’s initial story fell apart in spectacular fashion, parents got louder, all while the District has been silent. No parent of a middle school child believes that this was “student-led.”
CUSD owes parents a truthful explanation and a promise that our schools will focus on creating an actual “productive learning environment,” not one where elementary children are subjected to obscenities, classroom instruction is disrupted, and political activism takes priority over student safety.
There is something parents might want to stage a walkout over. According to the latest state test scores, only 44% of CHMS students are proficient in math, and 38% aren’t proficient in English.
But at least they can spell “F*CK ICE.”
Scott Davison is the executive director of the Carlsbad Education Alliance, a community watchdog group committed to pursuing transparency, accountability and academic excellence in Carlsbad schools.
