Texas: “In-School Suspension Program” Uses GPS Tracking Systems Attached to Students
May 13th, 2008You’ve got to hand it to the New York Times. This one goes down smooth. The GPS system is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It tracks, it traces, it slices, it dices, it gets results, it saves lives. And it saves money! Who needs jail for the kiddies when an “in-school suspension program” is available?
“Big Brother,” you say.
Phooey.
“This is a device that connects you to a buddy who wants to keep you safe and help you graduate,” says Dave Leis, a spokesman for NovaTracker, the company that makes the tracking system.
If that’s not double plus good, I don’t know what is.
Now, I got sidetracked from all the better-living-through-surveillance claptrap onto a different issue. The article says that Jaime Pacheco doesn’t eat breakfast at home, but when he gets to school and activates his tracking unit, he heads to the cafeteria. Does “in-school suspension” include some form of breakfast? Indeed, I think it does.
What gastronomical delights await the kiddies at Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas?
* Shudder *
After some meandering around the high school’s website, I found this menu.
What you’ve got there is a recipe for diabetes and ADHD. Highly refined white flour, sugar, cast off slag from unthinkable, industrial meat production operations and salt. We almost certainly don’t want to know what else.
I called Becky over to look at it and we were both struck dumb by the sight of a main breakfast entrée called a “Breakfast Stick.”
WTF is a breakfast stick?
I played with the handy feeding time configurator and the breakfast stick looks like some form of corn dog. But what’s in that thing?
Anyway, gazing upon the U.S. now just seems like looking at Hell as a fractal. You zoom in, and there’s more Hell. Zoom in again, more Hell. Zoom in again, GPS tracked students. Zoom in again, breakfast stick.
Via: New York Times:
Jaime Pacheco rolled out of bed at dawn last week to the blaring chorus of two alarms. Then Jaime, a 15-year-old high school freshman, smoothed his striped comforter, dumped two scoops of kibble for the dogs out back and strapped a G.P.S. monitor to his belt.
Jaime Pacheco, a student in East Dallas, has not missed school since being chosen by a judge to carry a device that tracks his movements.
By 7:15, Jaime was in the passenger seat of his grandmother’s sport-utility vehicle, holding the little black monitor out the window for the satellite to register. A few miles down the road, at Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas, he got out of the car, said goodbye to his grandmother and paused to press a button on the unit three times. A green light flashed, and then Jaime headed for the cafeteria with plenty of time before the morning bell.
It was not always like this. Jaime used to snooze until 2 p.m. before strolling into school. He fell so far behind that he is failing most of his classes and school officials sent him to truancy court.
Instead of juvenile detention, Jaime was selected by a judge to be enrolled in a pilot program at Bryan Adams in which chronically truant students are monitored electronically. Since Jaime started carrying the Global Positioning System unit April 1, he has had perfect attendance.
“I’m just glad they didn’t take him to jail,” said Jaime’s grandmother Diana Mendez, who raised him. “He’s a good kid. He was just on a crooked path.”
Sweet Goddess of the Moon have mercy! If you were a candidiasis patient, that cafeteria would probably be the death of you (in terms of quality of life if not literally)!
BTW Kevin, I thought you might find this interesting: A poster on a candida-forum I read just told me that raw milk and products made from it are allowed in limited quantities in the maintenance-phase of the candida-diet. (The main things that have to be cut out on the candida diet are refined sugar and wheat-products, not surprisingly. Civilization’s biggest “gifts” to us humans. Just one example of what made me end up becoming a primitivist sympathizer!)
And since when did they start naming high schools after 80’s pop-stars?
That’s real weird that they could get all the calorie information online, but couldn’t work on the food itself. Where I went to school, I think the staff just decided what they wanted to cook.
Here at UMinnesota, a student reports being recruited to spy on the vegetarians – they weren’t suspected of any crime but they just feel nervous about what they’re doing at their potlucks: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20080512120907228
answers answers everywhere:
from the Texas Department of Education:
a breakfast stick is: Pancake and Sausage on a stick.
Loverly, just loverly. All that wonderful corporate nutrition washed down with some lovely fertilizer and pesticide residue-laden beverage. You have to love the smoothness with which they get us to volunteer ourselves and our children to be walking medical experiments, always with the veiled threat of non-assimilation for those who refuse to comply, or those who ask to many questions.
Is our children learning, yet ?
As for the other part of your commentary, K, I agree wholeheartedly with you about the fractal granularity of the nightmare that is modern life in America, but i would add that the velocity of new outrages being adopted as mainstream, as normal, is asymptotic, and we are fast approaching the limit … i feel like a bit player in that creepy movie They Live .
oops. Of course, a paranoid would notice that they deliberately picked an uncooperative person so that they’d raise a fuss and scare vegans from meeting, so I’m helping do their work by forwarding that.
@ dagobaz:
Brother, life’s a bitch, and she’s back in heat!
I dunno at least the school is “putting food” on the kid.
We didn’t even have a caferia when I was in high school.
The cafeteria in my high school was converted into classrooms.
We never once missed the slop spinach.
My breakfast in junior and senior years of high school always involved a corncob pipe while watching for the school bus. Better than a cup of coffee.
Mom and Pop were long gone to work at the family biz and we were on our own.
The slogan in my youth was “reading is fundamental.” Back then franken-freak-food wasn’t a dream yet in Monsato’s eye.
In this day and age though, the slogan should be “eating is fundamental.”
And while I think it freakin sucks that this kid responds and performs according the freakin ball and chain monitoring his behavior, well I dunno if its such a bad thing in this situation.
At the very least, this kid isn’t in a freakin prison working on a production line for Big Brother and his Multiple Holding Companies.