Another Beer Bash
Principal and Teacher Arrested
By Daniel Muniz

Beer and minors do not mix and it is against the law for anyone to contribute to the delinquency of a minor by offering alcoholic beverages to them. But when a high school principal and a middle school teacher provided kegs of beer to kids during a party and charged them money for it, not only is it wrong, it is outrageous.

Assistant principal John Clark of Newberry High School in Newberry South Carolina and his wife Mary who teaches at Newberry Middle School did just that.

During the summer at their lake house, husband and wife threw a keg party where a number of students were present. The kids were charged $5 at the event where they not only enjoyed the beer on tap but there was also a spiked punch that was available. The Clarks saw absolutely nothing wrong in not only throwing a booze bash but actually charging the kids money to participate in it.
 

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Anybody who throws a keg party and allows minors to get drunk off of it is an irresponsible and reckless adult. Adolescents who lack any maturity and self-control are very likely to binge drink, which is already a serious problem among many college students of legal age. But when a high school principal and a schoolteacher provide it, it is not only reprehensible but downright despicable.

John and Mary Clark did not make good decisions and both of them did not exercise good judgment.

But more to the point is that both of them lacked the common sense and maturity that is expected for professionals in the field of education. Society holds educators and the educational leadership to a higher moral standard because they are involved in direct contract with our children and wield enormous influence over them. As a result, the community expects faculty and staff to behave in a responsible mature manner, even in their off time.

That obviously didn’t happen here.

The high school principal and the schoolteacher violated that trust.

On a national scale, our education system has been rocked by scandal after scandal of lewd indecent behavior such as this and more recently there have been media sensations of young attractive female teachers having sex with teenage boys. And as outrageous incidents like this become more commonplace, society will begin to lose faith in the integrity of the education system and especially of its personnel.

And that has already happened where certain parents feel that teachers are not as intelligent or as competent as professionals in other fields. Now we are on this slippery slope where parents are now suspecting that faculty and staff is not as mature and responsible as they ought to be. The perception of decadence will be magnified as incidents like this create more media sensations across the country.

This bad behavior by the professionals in our education has to stop.

On the surface it sounds ridiculous to tell educators and administrators that they cannot give beer to kids and get drunk with them. That ought to be common sense but this nation is going through a cultural shift where norms are constantly changing. There are plenty of parents who think that they ought to be given the “parent of the year” award for setting up a booze bash and having their children and all of their friends get plastered at home.

So what the Clarks did was not necessarily unusual since a number of irresponsible parents have already done similar things. Too many people think that kids are adults who happen to wear smaller clothes. Consequently, they end up treating them as adults even though they are still minors.

Education is perhaps one of the few professions in the nation where responsible behavior is a requirement. And with the way that children have been victimized by educators, it is of the utmost importance that a higher standard of conduct be adhered to. The local community has an implicit trust that teachers and principals will not engage in illegal or illicit conduct, especially when their children are present.

School districts really need to spell it out to all of their employees on what is and is not acceptable behavior.

Yes, it is absurd for a district to do such a thing but that message has to be reinforced on a regular basis. There are certain things that a responsible teacher and principal cannot do with adolescents and that includes giving them beer or having sex with them. Additionally, consequences of these actions also have to be explicitly spelled out such as getting arrested, losing your job, having your certifications revoked, and the major media sources picking up the story and turning it into a circus and late night television fodder.

And if faculty and staff don’t want this kind of behavior scrutinized, then perhaps education is not the field that they should be in. Maybe husband and wife would have been better off working as bartenders.

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