Could Frisco ISD Soon Use Students as Janitors?

This is part of the headline on an article about suggestions for the school district to cut costs.

This is normal in Japanese schools. Students finish their morning classes, eat lunch, clean the whole school, and then go to recess. Each class is assigned a particular area of the school to clean on a rotating schedule and the areas are inspected by their teachers before they are released for recess.

I think it might be good to make it normal here, as well, not just to cut costs, but also because it develops a sense of responsibility, work ethic, etc.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

And it gets the kids up and moving.

Valerie

Grim said...

It's not a problem for all the kids to do it. Helping with the work necessary to maintain the facilities that provide their education would probably even be character-building in some ways.

Jack Kingston, the Congressman out of Savannah, recently proposed a plan in which only the poor kids (the ones on free/reduced lunches) would be required to do janitorial work. His version is a non-starter for me.

Anonymous said...

All the kids at my school take a rotation cleaning up the lunch room. One stint on that duty and they seem far less interested in food fights and making messes for fun.

LittleRed1

E Hines said...

I had summer jobs with my K-12 school district cleaning the schools and stocking from a central warehouse each of them with their initial inventory of books and consumable supplies.

Another cost-saving measure: encourage all the students to bring their own lunches to relieve the demands on school cafeterias. My recommended staple lunch is PBJs, ad lib. They'd even satisfy Michelle Obama's nutrition demands, consisting as they do of the four major food groups: bread, peanut butter, jelly, and bread. Or not. But they'd be cheaper.

Eric Hines

E Hines said...

...only the poor kids (the ones on free/reduced lunches) would be required to do janitorial work.

I don't have a problem with that. They should earn their subsidies. The unsubsidized kids can be given other tasks, if grounds maintenance can be counted as separate from janitorial work, for instance.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

No, the idea is that the kids who have money get to point and laugh at their poorer classmates while they mop the floors and take out the trash.

E Hines said...

They're doing that anyway; this wouldn't change that. Their own school tasks--groundskeeping, maybe--would do more to alleviate that.

That, and parents actually doing parenting again.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

No, under Kingston's plan the rich kids don't have to do anything. It's a different plan than the one discussed at Tom's link.

E Hines said...

Which is why I suggested the alternative.

Eric Hines

Tom said...

I don't know. The kids aren't the ones who would owe the school money; their parents would. If we are doing this to pay for what the parents actually don't have cash for, the parents should clean the school, or do other equivalent work. Plus, if both groups of students would be doing equivalent work, why separate them?

In addition, the Japanese system uses this as one way to develop teamwork and esprit de corps. It may sound odd to use that term for an elementary school class, but it's true. Dividing duties up based on economic class doesn't seem like it would be beneficial for that.

Grim said...

If we are doing this to pay for what the parents actually don't have cash for, the parents should clean the school, or do other equivalent work. Plus, if both groups of students would be doing equivalent work, why separate them?

Getting awfully close to 13-amendment violations here. School is mandatory; feeding the students at school is therefore necessary; parents who can't pay for it need to be compelled (by law, presumably) to show up and work it off.

The 13th doesn't come into play in forcing the students to clean the school only because they are minors, and the school is acting in loco parentis. But maybe that's even too far: it's hard to educate a free people on the liberties they ought to hold bear in institutions designed to train them to submit to violations of those liberties.

E Hines said...

... it's hard to educate a free people on the liberties they ought to hold bear in institutions designed to train them to submit to violations of those liberties.

Depends on how they're taught: vis., here's an example of forced labor and its pernicious effects. Or better, use the student janitorial and associated work to teach both the indivisibility of the duties that go with the liberties and the human efforts to give them both force in inherently imperfect law.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

...here's an example of forced labor and its pernicious effects.

It is true that High School already provides many practical educational opportunities to learn a virtuous hatred of being under the thumb of petty government officials.

Tom said...

Getting awfully close to 13-amendment violations here. School is mandatory; feeding the students at school is therefore necessary; parents who can't pay for it need to be compelled (by law, presumably) to show up and work it off.

Well, I brought that up in opposition. I wasn't suggesting we actually do that.

Ymar Sakar said...

I don't have a problem with that. They should earn their subsidies.

I always wondered why Southern slave lords didn't have a problem breeding beasts (blacks) in the field to do the work while the white land lords had leisure and self education opportunities.

They didn't have a problem with it because it allowed for each person to earn their life, in the state and caste that they belonged to.

And for the most part, they succeeded in creating a good living standard for aristocrats and the direct house servants loyal to them as family (dogs).

Unlike Jesus of Nazareth's adoption of all of humanity, impure genetics or not, into the Princedom and direct inheritance of the AOmega kingdom, humans are limited to saving a few strays here and there. Usually either themselves or a limited few that can get out of the crab buckets.

Everybody else sinks to their level of power, which is weakness.

The Asians figured most of this out a long time ago. They try not to segment their society into unequal portions, because to be honest, it already is segmented, but they need everyone to at least pretend to pull together in cleaning up after themselves. Collective responsibility at large.