Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "WBFF FOX45 Baltimore" channel.

TBH, that's the bigger story. If the grades are that bad, it's not just one bad parent, it's a bunch of bad parents, a bunch of ineffective administrators and a bunch of bad, ineffective, unsupported or overwhelmed teachers.
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I don't see her advocating for him or even paying attention to him. The school also messed up royally, but the reality is that the diploma that he gets will be completely worthless if he's allowed to graduate with a GPA under 1.0. There are just so many people that screwed up here, and the kid is ultimately not set up for even bare minimum type of functioning in society.
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I'm not even sure that it's not even legal to still be attending high school at that age. It's a large part of why the GED was developed. Having adults as students in the same school as high school students is a significant issue for so many reasons.
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That's the bit that I don't understand. Report cards are sent out multiple times every year and there are parent-teacher conferences. I do get that she may not have been able to get off work for the conferences, but how does she go multiple years without actually noticing the grades? The school can't allow him to graduate with a GPA that low. That's not to say that the school is in the right here, how on earth are students with grades that low not getting any sort of help? But, she clearly wasn't paying attention or asking any questions if he's got a sub 1.0 GPA and thinks he's good to graduate.
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A lot of students like that get passed on more or less automatically. There's supposed to be remedial support provided to the students in order to help make it up. But, there's only so much of that you can do. If we're talking about somebody completely failing multiple years of school, they're going to have to be held back because there is only about a year worth of extra time in a typical high school curriculum to be had. So, you need to pass roughly 3/4 of the classes to graduate. Or at least that's what it was like when I was in high school decades ago, if you passed all of your classes and took the right ones, you barely had any classes required senior year.
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That's only partially correct. What's supposed to happen is that if they were promoted in spite of not being ready, there's supposed to be remedial help the next year to catch up in lieu of some of the electives. It's not supposed to be students just being passed year after year without achieving anything.
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In cases like that, there's supposed to be remedial work and support provided to bridge the gap. There's a lot of reasons why that doesn't happen, but that's what's supposed to happen. The idea is that students have severe issues socially if they're held back and that they may wind up dropping out early and not even getting the exposure to the material that they would get by just being promoted. I'm not supper enthusiastic about that approach, but when done properly, it can work. The issue is that it's often not done properly and really screws students over in those cases.
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@Abdul-w1f Precisely, it's not fair to expect her to have the resources and know how to fix much of this, but she apparently didn't even look at any of the report cards. Even if he got all his passing marks on the same report card, that would still be terrible grades.
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He's in high school, he should be able to manage better than this without any support. He's not even attending any of the classes. He's to blame, the mother is to blame and the school is to blame. Everybody involved here messed up.
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@aryaganne9364 Clearly, the school screwed up a lot here. I think the focus on the mother isn't inappropriate though. I'm curious why she didn't have the time over the course of multiple years to look at any of the report cards. That being said, the school is definitely primarily at fault here. Why did they keep promoting him if the was this far behind? The kid is legally obligated to get at least the first 2 years of highschool as the laws stand. So, why was he nominally a senior when he had fewer credits than what a freshman should have by the end of the first semester?
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The no homework thing isn't that odd, there's been a decided shift away from homework for various reasons. A big chunk of it is families like this one were the parents can't/won't help the students work on it, or there isn't even a stable place to do the work without the support.
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Yes, even being held back at all is rather rare these days. Same goes for being skipped ahead. One of my friends was held back and then skipped ahead 2 grades the next year. Granted that was 2 times through kindergarten and he was on the young side at the time, but still. Even at that age, it's rather unusual.
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That's not how it's supposed to be done. If you don't pass and get moved on automatically, there's supposed to be remedial work that's provided by the school with the time coming from fluff electives. If that's not how it's begin done where you are, that's incompetence.
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I kind of get not having the meetings if she's a single mother and needing to work. But, even in that case, there should have been attempts by the school to reach out to figure out what was going on. The other bit about her not knowing that he was failing is really puzzling. If he was a senior, then there should have been at least 12 report cards sent home during that time. One per quarter for 3 years. Even on the trimester system that some schools are on, you're talking about 9 report cards that she should have seen. And, apparently, she didn't see any of them.
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It is, but so is being in classes based on your calendar age when you're ability and development levels are significantly different from the other students. I was bored out of my mind through most of middle school and all of high school. Granted, I do have ADHD and likely dyslexia, but I was allowed to go to college in lieu of the latter half of high school and did better both academically and socially than I was doing. I now know that I'm almost certainly autistic, but sometimes it would be better to ignore the age and look at whether the student is really better off with their peers based on their age, or if it should be based on ability or developmental peers.
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To be fair, the school is also clearly a major factor here as well. But, she's not making herself look good by being this generally ignorant about what's going on with her son. The report cards alone should have been a clue that he wasn't on track to graduate.
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