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One Day School Boycott at Monroe

ONE DAY SCHOOL BOYCOTT AT MONROE

The statewide practice for enforcing attendance at prison schools is simple: three unexcused absences and they drop you. Well, some prisoncrat decided that inmate attendance at the Reformatory was not up to par with those at other facilities. Rather than merely enforce the standard three absence drop rule, however, some mental giant got the idea of infracting any prisoner who was late for class and did not possess one of the narrow justifications approved by the administration. According to this new rule, it made no difference if you had not missed a single class in years, if you were late just once without a proper excuse you'd be written up for a violation of WAC 104.

The response of Monroe prisoners was not unpredictable. Many prisoners quit the school on the spot, others dropped nonessential classes, and a little under a third of the remaining students registered their displeasure with a boycott of all classes. The boycott was for one day.

The end result of this punishment approach to education is that the school has far fewer students now than it would have had officials maintained attendance the same way it is done at every other joint in the state.

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