Twelve-year-old William Faulhaber left the new city skate park in handcuffs on November 18th. His offense? Not wearing a helmet. Watch video of the arrest and read more on the News Blog.
Month: December 2011
When skateboarder William Faulhaber was dropped off by his father at the new city skate park on Friday, November 18th, he assumed he’d be leaving a couple of hours later when his dad came back to pick him up. Instead, the 12-year-old left in handcuffs. His offense? Not wearing a helmet.
Just a few minutes after William’s father Hans dropped his son off, Memphis Police officer Otto Kiehl arrived at the park and handcuffed William for not wearing a helmet. In a video of the arrest, taken by an unknown bystander, Kiehl is shown walking William to his squad car in cuffs, as he says, “I will be arresting every time I come by. I will be arresting somebody, whoever is not wearing a helmet.”
Several onlookers protest the arrest, yelling “There’s n*** getting raped and stabbed, and you want to arrest little kids” and “You need to be fired!”
Although the officer said he’d be “arresting,” William was not taken to jail. The officer put him in a squad car and drove him home, but he was given a juvenile summons and must appear in court for criminal trespassing.
According to the summons, Kiehl says he made an announcement on his PA system advising “that it is illegal to use this facility without a helmet.” It doesn’t say what time that announcement was made, but Kiehl does state that he came back fifteen minutes later and made another announcement, and nearly all skaters not wearing helmets had stopped skating, except for William.
However, William’s father said his son never heard an announcement. He believes William may have been dropped off after the first warning was made.
“It didn’t occur to me until later that William couldn’t have been there for the warning,” Hans said. “He didn’t know anything about that.”
There are several rules posted outside the skate park, and one of those does suggest skaters wear helmets, but currently there is no law against not wearing a helmet. The Memphis City Council is expected to vote Tuesday on a proposed city ordinance mandating that skaters and cyclists wear helmets, but once passed, violators will face a $50 fine. The ordinance language does not state anything about arresting violators.
Kiehl drove William to his father’s house and explained to Hans why his son was taken out of the park in cuffs. Because there’s no law against not wearing a helmet, William was charged with criminal trespassing.
“I wasn’t really that upset about it until the officer said he was going to write a summons. That means I have to appear in juvenile court. It also means I have to engage the services of an attorney, which I’ve already done,” Hans said.
“The cop keeps telling me it’s not going to matter. It’s not going on his record. He said he was more or less being arrested to be made an example of. But it is a big deal, and it became a bigger deal when I saw the video,” Hans said. “When my son showed up on my doorstep, he was standing beside the cop. But [on the video], when my son was put into the squad car, he was handcuffed.”
William didn’t have a helmet with him because he’d forgotten it at home, Hans said. And although his father agrees with the park’s helmet rule, he thinks the officer went too far.
“I don’t disagree that helmets should be worn. Helmets are a good thing. They protect you from skull fractures. But I disagree with the way this went down,” Hans said. “I’m sure the cop carries a cell phone. Why didn’t he just call me and have me come to the park?”
Cindy Buchanan, director of Parks Services, couldn’t comment on this situation without input from the Memphis Police Department, and they were unavailable at press time. But Buchanan did confirm that the Memphis Police are charged with enforcing the rules in city parks, and she said the helmet rule is among the most important at the park.
“We’re very excited to have a skate park, but we also know that you have to take safety precautions because skateboarding is not a risk-free sport. People are always trying new things and taking risks,” Buchanan said. “We just want [skaters] to have fun and be as safe as they possibly can.”
Read more on this story in next week’s print edition of the Memphis Flyer.
Yes, sometimes things get a little slow here in Flyer Land on Friday afternoon. When that happens, I occasionally go to Wordsmith.org‘s anagram generator. Minutes of fun! This time, I typed in the names of some of the GOP presidential candidates. Oh my.
Newt Leroy Gingrich: Leeching Ingrown Tyro, Generic Yowling Thorn, Incoherently Gig Worn
Willard Mitt Romney: Tiny Treadmill Worm, Try Denial Milt Worm, Readmit My Torn Will
Herman Cain (no middle name): Inane Charm, Reach In Man, He Can Ram In, Harem in Can
Ronald Ernest Paul: Arena Polled Runts, Oldest Anal Pruner, Leaden Parlor Nuts
And in the interest of fairness and balance:
Nancy Pelosi: Sly Canine Op, No Lacy Penis, Can Nosey Lip
More later, if I get a moment.
Categories
“Deja Vu Do Me Now”
The whimsically fantastic works of Alex Warble are featured in “Deja Vu Do Me Now,” opening Friday.
Categories
Escapes From Public Schools
John Branston writes about the myriad of future options that will impede a cohesive county/city school district.
Categories
Public School Escape Hatches
What do a star football player at St. George’s private school, Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald, State Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman, and former mayor Willie Herenton have in common?
They’re all threats to the future consolidated Memphis and Shelby County public school system, which is going to be riddled with escape hatches that could potentially draw away tens of thousands of students and the state dollars that go with them.
Omar Williams, pictured in The Commercial Appeal today, is a running back at St. George’s who transferred from Manassas High School. He is one of several black athletes who have gone from Memphis public schools to private schools such as St. George’s, Briarcrest, and MUS. The best known include Elliot Williams, who went to St. George’s before playing basketball at Duke and Memphis, and Michael Oher, who went to Briarcrest before starring at Ole Miss and in the NFL. Competitive private schools welcome such student athletes — and some of their non-jock classmates — for reasons of altruism, diversity, and winning championships. Recruiting is not just for colleges. Look at all the University of Memphis basketball players who went to private academies whose specialty is prepping the cream of the crop for careers at Division 1 powerhouse schools and, perhaps, the NBA. I’m surprised Memphis doesn’t have such an “academy” for jocks right here at home already.
Keith McDonald is the most prominent no-ifs-ands-or-buts-about-it proponent of separate suburban school systems. Bartlett, Germantown, Collierville, and Millington are all studying the prospects. That represents a potential loss of tens of thousands of students to the consolidated Shelby County system two years from now.
Charter schools are a third escape hatch. The joint school board this week denied new applications, but the board and MCS Superintendent Kriner Cash seem to have a different point of view than Education Commissioner Huffman. See Jackson Baker’s blog post here.
Herenton is one of the applicants for multiple charter schools. He told me Friday he has appealed the denial of his application to the state treasurer’s office, which will look at the impact on finances. A decision is expected in a month. If the treasurer rejects the school board’s claim that charters adversely effect budgets, then Herenton will appeal to the education commissioner, who could direct the school board to approve the application.
“The unified board has not adequately read the future of the Memphis and Shelby county public school system,” Herenton said. “They have not accepted that the educational arena is going to change even more dramatically n the future. MCS has been a colossal failure in terms of educating the children in the inner city and in poverty. Parents, students and teachers deserve the opportunity to participate in a variety of programs.”
Herenton is a former MCS superintendent. Asked what he would do today if he was in Kriner Cash’s shoes, he said “if educators and board members are really concerned about improving academics, then they shouldn’t care who is given leadership. They have to put children first, but they have put their own interests first.”
Cash and board members say they are just trying to operate within their budget, and they have to employ roughly the same number of people and cover the same overhead, at least in the short run, despite the influx and outflow of students.
They’re fighting on multiple fronts. It sometimes looks like a rearguard action because charters have by and large avoided close scrutiny and get pretty good press in Memphis and Nashville.
But setting up a new school much less a new system is hard and expensive. Sooner or later, MCS/SCS will have to stop playing defense and go on offense — in other words, make the positive case for a big unified school system with veteran teachers, principals, coaches, marching bands, extracurricular activities, no tuition, proud tradition, bus routes, neighborhood identity, stability, whatever. The appeal will have to be “why you should choose us” not “why you should not be allowed to leave us.”
Once deregulation begins, there is no stopping it. There is a very good chance that the future consolidated system could become the current MCS system, minus hundreds if not thousands of its most athletic, college-bound, and motivated students and parents. That’s the thing about escape hatches.
- JB
- Solar (left) and Huffman at Planning Commission meeting
State Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman and Ash Solar, chief strategy advisor for the state’s burgeoning new Achievement School District, paid a visit Thursday evening to a meeting of the Shelby County Planning Commission, which is charged with providing advice for the forthcoming merger of Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools. Both state officials gave detailed presentations of the multi-faceted state strategy for improving failing schools.
One catch: Implicit in the elaborate models discussed — if largely unspoken — was the significant role to be played by charter schools, which the Haslam administration has made a major commitment to. And only two nights earlier the county’s interim 23-member unified school board poured a few more shovelfuls of dirt on the concept of new charter schools, applications for which the board had roundly defeated and buried in its two previous meetings.
At those prior meetings, 17 charter-school applications, including several by former Memphis City Schools superintendent and Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, had been turned down and then rejected again when resubmitted in greater detail.
The major reason for the rejections had been given as concern about the additional expense entailed by new charter schools, but at the Tuesday night meeting this week, the board heard from several ideological opponents of charter schools per se, a number of whom expressed concern about dilution of regular public school education, in the process citing such anti-charter school theorists as Diane Ravitch of New York University. (John Branston has more on “escape hatches” from traditional public education.)
Given that charter schools had been stoutly resisted by members of the former Shelby County Schools board and that resistance to new ones is growing among members of the former Memphis City Schools board, the unified board may be on a collision course of sorts with one of the central premises of the Haslam administration’s school reforms.
According to Jane Roberts in The Commercial Appeal, Huffman had used the expression “bad policy” earlier Thursday in a meeting with the CA‘s editorial board to describe the developing resistance to charter schools on the part of the interim school board.
In any event, charter schools as such were downplayed at Thursday night’s Planning Commission meeting. Most of the presentation, especially on Huffman’s part, was focused on several modes by which the administration proposes to raise the level of existing low-performing schools, putting the bottom-most under ASD (Achievement School District) control and guiding the next level up into “district-level innovative zones.”
Unsurprisingly, Memphis provides a largish proportion of the state’s ASD-eligible schools. — 25 out of the current 34 so designated statewide. Huffman may have whetted the appetite of Planning Commission members (and those interim School Board members who were present) with his mention of $40 million in funding which the state would make available for the ASD effort in March, to be followed by another $40 million next fall.
Categories
Mitt’s Principles Go to the Highest Bidder
Richard Cohen says Mitt Romney’s flip-flops are a symptom of venture capitalist politics.
Categories
My Week With Marilyn
Chris Herrington reviews Michelle Williams’ star turn, My Week With Marilyn.
If you missed meeting photographer, architect, set designer, historic preservationist, and fourth-generation Delta daughter Nell Dickerson when Gone (BelleBooks) appeared this past spring, you’ve got another chance.
The Read in Peace book club, which meets in Memphis’ Historic Elmwood Cemetery, is hosting Dickerson on Saturday, December 3rd, at noon inside the cemetery’s chapel (824 S. Dudley).
Dickerson will be on hand to discuss not only her book but the preservationist cause behind it: rescuing what remains architecturally of the antebellum South. It was a cause that Dickerson shared with her relative through marriage, novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote.
Gone, which will be available for purchase at Elmwood and for Dickerson to sign, reprints a chapter from Foote’s novel Jordan County, and it features Dickerson’s own sensitive photography, which pictures mansions and humble homesteads, civic buildings and the land itself. It’s beautifully done.
Cost to attend the event is $12 person, which includes lunch. Register at elmwoodcemetery.org/events or call 901-774-3212.