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Show Home and School Vandalism isepidemic By Dr. Daryl J. McCarty Executive Secretary Utah Education Association Your son and his buddies are bored one night, so they get into the school through a window, rummage through a few teachers' desks and then start bashing windows and water fountains. They get caught. When the officer brings your son home with the news, you are shocked silly. But the real shocker comes when you take Junior to juvenile court for his hearing. The judge turns to you, explains that there's a new Utah law in effect, and it provides that His Honor can order Mom and Dad to pay up to $1,000 in damages. Since it's a new law, and we haven't yet seen how sternly our judges will use it, we don't yet know how effective ef-fective it will be in stemming the tide of vandalism. And a tide it is. One large Utah school district reported that willful destruction of property amounted to more than $200,000 last year alone. Last year, it is estimated that students across the nation caused $600 million dollars worth of window-shattering, window-shattering, carpet-ripping, fire-setting and other vandalism in public schools. Six hundred million dollars! That's enough cash to buy 48,426,150 turkeys for hungry families. It's enough to pay the tab for 154,241,645 bottles of insulin for victims of diabetes. And it would put shoes on the feet of 33,333,333 school children. This is a problem that has challenged the minds of America's brighest judges, school administrators and i law enforcement officers. Still, the tinkle of shattering j glass is heard in schools : throughout the nation night ; after night. ' With all the thinking, : parent, innovating, policing, : pleading, reasoning, punishing and warning, we still haven't come close to whipping the problem. What about your thinking, parents? Do we need to show our kids results of these late-night missions of destruction to demonstrate demon-strate how senseless they are? If you have any ideas, I can tell yo you some people who should be eager to hear them. These people are the 40 superintendents of Utah's school districts - the people who have to find ways to pay the bills for all this destruction. |