A Daytime Curfew? What's Next, Making Kids Wear Mao Jackets?

Save Ferris: Elsewhere in this week's paper, Jim Schutze is mounting a spirited defense of DISD's magnet schools for talented and gifted students. The district's magnets and its learning centers for disadvantaged students were threatened with staff cuts thanks to a federal funding formula that requires each DISD campus to get roughly the same resources. Right now, though, it looks like the magnet schools might be spared any onerous requirements of equality.

So, good news for the TAG kids. But who, we ask, who will rise up to speak for the great mass of students who are neither talented nor gifted nor disadvantaged? Who will defend "the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, [and] dickheads" who this very moment are facing a major threat to their rights to cut class, get a little high maybe and spend the school day hanging out at the mall?

Buzz will, that's who. They're our people. Oh, and the American Civil Liberties Union will too.

This week, unless the Dallas City Council agrees to a delay requested by the ACLU of Texas, the city could very well approve a daytime curfew that would essentially ban kids from being on the streets between 9 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on school days. Violators could face up to a $500 fine. Supporters on the council say the measure is needed to help fight juvenile crime. The ACLU has filed an open records request seeking any crime stats the council is using to support the notion the curfew is needed.

No word on whether the council has agreed to delay voting, but if numbers, facts and law are all the ACLU has to persuade the council to NOT do something, well, good luck with that.

Dotty Griffith, the ACLU's public education director, says the group fears that tagging kids with misdemeanor records could haunt them when it comes time to apply for college or a job. "Once you're in the system, it can be hard to get out," she told Buzz.

Amen.

Threats to the kiddies' permanent records aside, what's really worrisome about this daytime curfew is what it says about the adults—the people Buzz's age—who are finally running this world. Are the Ed Rooneys and Dean Wormers triumphant? Is Ferris' dream of a day off really dead in the hearts of our elected representatives?

Yeah, probably. What'd you expect? Those guys are probably the sort who went to a TAG school. Losers.