A
HANDBOOK ON STUDENT RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
WITH
AN EMPHASIS ON CALIFORNIA LAW
Handbook Introduction
Every right implies a corresponding
responsibility. You must be willing to assure all people, parents, students and
educators, the same ideas of dignity and respect which you see as essential for
yourself. Once the gift is realized, it must be shared.
The Handbook is to inform, guide and
move people to intelligently claim the gifts which are rightfully theirs. Those
most abused by governments and other power structures are not ethnic,
religious, social or political groups. Rather, they are the neglected children,
the world's greatest minority. Our educational system, if left unchecked, can
both intentionally and unintentionally exploit the children who have been
entrusted to their care.
Too often school-aged children suffer
a sub-culture of incompetence. Too often, a vandalism of the mind is struck in
place of originality, enthusiasm, self-discovery, initiative, growth or
control. Too seldom are the beauty of genuine education revealed and the joy of
learning allowed to be felt, nourished and shared.
Being young is one of several
magnificent episodes in life. Sharing in another's youth, as a parent or an
educator, and accepting that awesome responsibility is another grand aspect of
living.
This Handbook is to facilitate that mutual
gauntlet of youthful growth and adult guidance. It is meant to illustrate and
document the inalienable rights of education which relate intrinsically to
students because they are human beings under the Constitution and cannot be
denied the justice, the respect and the opportunity to experience unqualified
excellence in an uncompromising school system.
Having information is not a panacea
for educational injustices. It is a genesis which can conceive a rewarding,
vital and challenging encounter among students, parents and educators.
Once introduced to your educational
rights as student, as this Handbook will do, refine this beginning with your
own research and discretion. Fortify your ideals and strategies with people of
similar philosophies. They are all around you, other students, your parents,
teachers, counselors, administrators and other community people. They simply
need to be awakened to what is and what should be. If enlisted thoughtfully and
with a candid sensitivity, you will rally a strength which is legion and which
cannot be ignored.
To court success you must be
knowledgeable, organized, respectful of people and their ideas, open to honest
negotiations and exceedingly patient. To have voluntarily initiated the quest,
to endure and to continue to lend quality to you life as a student, parent or
educator is to have known yourself.
Boyer P. August, Ed. D.
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