Handcuffed in the back of a police car sat a National Merit Scholar and the school’s top basketball player. Their crime: loitering during school hours.
On Wednesday, October 7, a group of MLK seniors left for lunch but neglected to sign out, a violation of MLK’s open campus lunch policy for seniors. They were subsequently picked up by the police and taken to a juvenile detention center where they were held until their parents came to pick them up.
Seniors are allowed to leave campus for lunch so long as their permission forms have been turned in and they sign out each time they leave campus.
The first two to be picked up by the cops were Jenny Hong and Vidiya Sathanathan. Neither of these students had her permission form turned in but made the decision to go to lunch nevertheless. When a cop pulled up and called to them, their biggest fear was that something was going on in the neighborhood and that they were to go back inside. The officer instead called the school to see if they’d signed out. When the officer discovered that they hadn’t, rather then send them back to school, he proceeded to put them in his car. After waiting for some time, they were then taken to the Metro Attendance center, charged with loitering, and detained until there parents retrieved them.
For two other sets of students, Will Brown and Peymun Najmi, Meaghanne Hooberry and Rebecca Hoffmeister, the story is the same. After being cited for loitering, they expected simply to be escorted back to the school; instead, they were placed in police cars and taken to the Attendance Center.
Dr. Schunn Turner, MLK’s executive principal, also was surprised to find that the students were taken away. She was even left in the dark about the events until the following day.
"When I was at Antioch [High School] the police usually escorted the students back to school,” said Dr. Turner.
The district-wide crackdown on truancy may be due to a change in personnel at the Central Office. The fact still remains that the whole incident could have been handled in house.
“I would much rather prefer to discipline my own students,” said Dr. Turner.
Another group of students had a different experience with the cops. Five friends were planning to go to lunch. While in the car an officer pulled up behind them and told them to step out one by one. After checking with the school the officer found out that only the driver and one passenger had signed out. This left three remaining students: Taylor Cummings, Will Scheving, and Cody Simons.
Cummings and Scheving, both minors, were put in the back of the car while 18- year-old Simons was told to wait, because as an adult he could not be charged with loitering. The officer left the two students in the back of the car where they waited. He then opened the door told, deemed it necessary to handcuff the students, and placed them back in the car.
Cummings and Scheving have never had any run in with the law, and each has excelled at MLK, Cummings in athletics and Scheving in academics. For them, being handcuffed seemed way out of line. The officer went back to filling out his paperwork before getting in the car himself and driving off without telling the students where they were headed.
Upon arriving at the Metro Attendance Center both Scheving and Cummings were searched and had phones and wallets confiscated. They were then put into a room with the other MLK students who had already been detained. At the center each student was required to fill out paperwork which asked questions like “Why do you habitually skip school?” and others that implied delinquency.
MLK students who wanted nothing more than to go to lunch were treated as criminals.
The students have been assigned a probation officer and are now entered in a four to eight week program. This program requires that students have no tardies, no absences, no failing grades, and must have weekly meetings with the guidance counselor. In addition, they must report to their probation officer if they go anywhere outside of their normal routine.
“If I were to go to a football game on Friday night, or a Titans game I would have to check in [with personal probation officer],” said Cummings.
The MLK students will have no trouble completing the program, but the mere fact that they must be subject to such scrutiny makes the policy of the police questionable.
No doubt the intentions of the police are good ones, yet the policies designed to keep students in school have had in MLK’s case the opposite effect. Students have had to miss several class periods to comply with this policy, more classes than they normally would.
“Originally we were planning to miss no school, going to lunch. We ended up missing the rest of that day and two periods on Friday,” said Cummings
The students all acknowledge that they did something wrong by not signing out. Where they have the biggest problem is the way the situation was handled.
“They didn’t have to take it that far, taking us to the detention center, and making our parents pick us up,” said Sathanathan.
The uproar over the incident has since subsided, and if the students complete the program without incident, their records will be completely wiped clean.
“It’s like it never happened,” said Dr Turner.
But of course it did happen. The students involved must suffer the consequences but they will be left with a distrust of a system designed to protect them.