Question- Are all these school shootings at public schools

[packman]

have ANY of them been at exclusive, elite private schools - or for that matter - ivy league universities or colleges? Is it just us "common folk" that has shouldered this burden of fear?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Not a shooting, but an incident at a private school

nearly 20 years ago now. I think it was a 7th or 8th grader who brought a gun to school, held a classmate hostage for a while, and the incident was resolved peacefully. The kid with the gun was understandably kicked out, and was put into a residential treatment program by his parents.

I happen to know about that incident because my son was another classmate of the two kids involved. I've done a brief google search, but this was so long ago and got so little coverage at the time, that I can't easily find it.

Keep in mind that over 90% of all k-12 students attend public schools, and the vast majority of private schools (79%) are religiously affiliated. You might expect 10% of such incidents to occur at private schools, but they don't.

Kids as disturbed as the ones who shoot up schools almost never wind up in private schools.

[packman]

2. What you said makes me think their enrollment will skyrocket

"Kids as disturbed as the ones who shoot up schools almost never wind up in private schools". If I had money to invest it would be in private school funds (if there is such a thing) or home-school stock (again, if there is such a thing).

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Private schools are not for profit.

And unless a whole lot of people step in to start private schools, their enrollment cannot skyrocket. Many of them have waiting lists. Good secular private schools, like the one my two sons attended, can be quite selective about who they admit in the first place. And they're not willing to put forty or sixty kids in a classroom, either. Class sizes are generally 10-15 students each.

Even with the high tuition the secular private schools charge, they still need to do a lot of fundraising to cover all of their costs. In fact, the school I referred to didn't pay teachers' full salaries for most, maybe all of the Depression, and took a good decade or more after that to pay what they'd owed in salaries. The incredible thing is that they kept good teachers that entire time.

A for-profit model for private k-12 schools is highly unlikely to take hold. Although we do more or less have that already in Charter Schools. Maybe you can buy stock in one of those companies.

[EffieBlack]

4. Not necessarily. Some private schools are for profit.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. Name one or two.

My limited knowledge of private k-12 schools, which are what I'm talking about, is that they all seem to be not for profit. Charter school companies are for profit. They are not the kinds of private schools I'm talking about. I'm talking about the generally excellent academic secular private schools.

[EffieBlack]

8. In addition to charters (which are private), there are a number of private, for-profit schools

For example, the World School in New York and the Altschools in New York and San Francisco are private, non-charter, for-profit elementary schools.

[d_r]

9. Charter schools

Are not private schools

[EffieBlack]

11. They are for all intents and purposes. But that's beside the point

and has nothing to do with the fact that some non-charter private schools are for-profit.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

12. A quick google check shows that Altschools

are not doing well. http://www.businessinsider.com/altschool-why-parents-leaving-2017-11

I do stand corrected. There are a tiny handful of private for profit schools out there. Not very many.

Charter schools are not exactly private. They take public money and are supposed to serve the public school kids equally, but a lot of them evade that requirement. But yes, the charter school companies are for-profit, and that's wrong. Not to mention, in most cases student at the charters do worse on the standardized tests than do their counterparts in the supposedly awful public schools.

[EffieBlack]

15. You're right - there aren't many. But I fear that we are moving toward them more and more

Especially with Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary.

Charter schools are ostensibly not private because they take public money. But in every other respect, they operate as private entities. They started off with good intentions and I thought the were a good idea, if only to act as a hedge against the rush toward private school vouchers and privatization. But they've proven to be as big of a problem for the reasons you note and others.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

17. Charter schools, yes. More and more regular public schools

will probably be converted to charters so long as Republicans are running things.

But real private schools? The kind that focus intently on academics and small classroom sizes? And I mean really small classroom sizes such is in never more than 15 kids in a classroom and usually fewer. Not gonna happen. They are far too expensive.

One thing I did learn from sending my kids to private school is that we should fund public schools so that they can more like private schools with the smaller class sizes and individual attention and so on. Unfortunately, the "let's run government like a business" mentality is very strong in the public's mind when it comes to education. Not exactly an appropriate model.

[bobbieinok]

5. What about charter schools?

[FarCenter]

7. West Nickel Mines School shooting

On October 2, 2006, a shooting occurred at the West Nickel Mines School, an Amish one-room schoolhouse in the Old Order Amish community of Nickel Mines, a village in Bart Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.[1][2][3] Gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV took hostages and shot eight out of ten girls (aged 6–13), killing five, before committing suicide in the schoolhouse.[1][2][3][4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Nickel_Mines_School_shooting

Scan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shootings_in_the_United_States for other cases.

[aikoaiko]

10. Often, but not always, private schools have a tighter sense of community.

That tighter sense of community may help a distressed student quicker or at least identify the threat quicker.

Community and good teachers were the main reasons I chose a p-12 private school for my son.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. Yes.

I moved our older son from an excellent public school to an even better secular private school because he was being bullied and it had become clear that keeping him in that public school system was not a good idea. After his first semester we moved his younger brother because it was obvious that the independent school (what they really prefer being called) was better in so many ways, not the least was academic.

Every once in a while someone here will say that all private schools should be done away with and I'm horrified at the thought. My older son would probably have been suicidal by the middle of 7th grade had he stayed in public school. And look at the cases of children who do kill themselves because of bullying.

[FSogol]

14. Actually, it is the opposite. Private schools just discharge the problem kids and they end up back

Last edited Sat Feb 17, 2018, 09:27 PM - Edit history (1)

in the public school system.

[aikoaiko]

16. True, that can happen, but many private schools will try to keep them first

For one thing, private schools are not bound to the moronic zero-tolerance policies that lead to the suspension of a child who eats a pop-tart into the shape of an L and pretend it is a gun.

[krispos42]

18. I looked up the number of schools in the country

I was surprised by the numbers... I thought public schools would outweigh private schools by a lot, but it's about a 3:1 ratio public/private.

About 98k public schools and 34k private schools.

So a quarter of all schools in the country are private. But, since they have smaller class sizes, about 9% of students are in private schools (51 million in public, 5.2 million private).

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372