More thoughts on last night's meeting...

It dawned on me at about 2am while I was sleeping, that Lisa Kaplan was sitting in the back row at the meeting last night about the Natomas crime spree. For those unfamiliar, Lisa Kaplan is the former president, now clerk of the Natomas Unified School District Board of Trustees.

I sat up and started thinking that Lisa Kaplan, Ron Dwyer-Voss and the rest of the board, should have been sitting on the stage instead of Mayor Fargo last night. How is it that a bunch of high school aged kids are committing crimes during school hours and the school district seemingly holds no responsibility for that? Where was the district's security team last night? Shouldn't most of those kids have been in school? Inderkum's graduation was 6/12 and I can't find the date but I'll bet Natomas' was close to that. So for the first two weeks of the crime spree, these thugs should have been the responsibility of NUSD.

In the long run, I'd like to know if the brats that Captain Hahn and his team have arrested are NUSD students. I'd like to know if they have attendance problems and if they have been appropriately processed by their schools. I would find it shockingly hard to believe if these guys were all good students that had somehow slipped under the radar. More likely, year after year, NUSD dropped the ball again.

I'm reminded of an incident about three years ago at the park next to Natomas Park Elementary School. I had my son there and we were playing in the sandbox early in the day. A younger boy (about 2nd grade) was swinging on the swings and waiting for school to start. Two 5th grade boys approached the boy, yelled at him, swore and used horrible language. They got up in his face and looked as though they may punch him. I immediately intervened and the older boys laughed and walked off. I grabbed my son, walked the younger boy to class and went to the office to report what I'd seen.

The school secretary refused to talk to me. She said that incidents in the park are not their problem. I showed my district ID, identified myself again as a district employee and asked to speak to the principal. No luck. I got a counselor who asked me to look through a yearbook and identify the kids but too no notes, made no attempt at doing ANYTHING. Great no bullying policy...

Absurd. Those two boys are probably now, or will be soon, perpetrating these crimes. No adult had ever held them accountable and their school didn't seen to care either.