What had seemed to be a done deal — an agreement between OPRF and the two local police departments on how to report crime committed at the school — has been, only temporarily we hope, derailed.
As the focus has turned the past two years to problems of drug and alcohol abuse among local teenagers, questions have rightly been raised about how the sale of drugs and the theft of goods within the school are treated by the school. While all involved have tried to put a decent face on this, it seems to us that there has been virtually no transparent protocol for reporting thefts or for reporting students found to be involved in criminal enterprise to the police.
We get that there are distinctions between teens being rowdy or rude and the school’s role in meting out consequences vs. dealing with actual crimes inside the building. We understand that the school board slowed an agreement to rightly review privacy issues among its students.
Somewhere between a kid leaving high school with a criminal record for a petty theft and the school being a sanctuary for theft or drug dealing, we need to find a balance.
