Scott L wrote:
Over the weekend, at a neighborhood party, I learned that
4 of DD's classmates had been suspended, and maybe expelled
for smoking pot in the boys' room (during the last class
period!). If such a thing happened in your kid's school,
would you expect some kind of notification from the
principal alerting you to what had happened? (This is
7th grade, by the way).

Short answer.... no. This incident does not pose any sort of threat
for my child, which would be my threshold for feeling entitled to be
"in the know." In my mind it's between the school, the students and
their parents.

I think you have to think about stuff like this from the point of view
of the other parents/kids. If your child made this mistake, would you
want an official notice going around about the incident? Even without
names, as you say it becomes the talk of the school and those names get
out.

It's also a law enforcement issue if they have police in the middle
schools where you live (we do). That raises all of the juvenile
justice rules about confidentiality.

And, from the school's point of view, any sort of official notice
invites second-guessing regarding the school's disciplinary steps, and
probably makes it harder to give kids a second chance if they feel it's
warranted. This type of incident could be all over the map -- could be
the time they *finally* caught a group that has been troublesome for a
long time, or could be a group of normally well-behaved kids who got a
hold of a single joint and made a spectacularly bad choice. The school
needs some leeway in handling these situations IMO, and the fewer
parents involved, the better.

-Dawn
Mom to a 7th grader, too ;-)