Illustration Julian Lucas
Redlands Unified School District promises to prepare students to become “productive participants in a diverse, multi-cultural, democratic society.”
That promise apparently expires when participation leaves the classroom.
Giving students consequences for walking out is one of those rituals adults perform to reassure themselves that authority still means something. But it’s all performative, a very old school way of operating.
Some of these consequence models were designed for a generation that navigated pagers and beepers, not smartphones and social media, yet they’re still shaping how students are disciplined today.
If it doesn’t improve learning, what exactly is it accomplishing?
But let’s be honest about what lies beneath the surface. Schools are funded by attendance. Bodies in seats translate into revenue, dollar signs, chi-ching! Yet when students leave those seats to engage in civic expression districts claim to champion in mission statements and civics curricula, the institutional response is either suspension, loss of privileges, and or detention. Really, detention still exists?
What exactly is being protected here?
A teenager sitting in a classroom on a Saturday without just doing homework with no lecture or intellectual stimulation or engagement, how boring. Or hanging out with a retiree resentfully picking up trash around the campus or handing out sports equipment at a community park because they joined a protest, is not suddenly absorbing equations out of renewed respect for policy.
Not learning. Not safety either, because most walkouts are organized, visible, and effectively supervised by sheer numbers and staff presence.
What’s being defended is compliance. Optics. The idea that rules must be seen enforcing themselves.
What exactly is being protected here?
A teenager sitting in a classroom on a Saturday without just doing homework with no lecture or intellectual stimulation or engagement, how boring. Or hanging out with a retiree resentfully picking up trash around the campus or handing out sports equipment at a community park because they joined a protest, is not suddenly absorbing equations out of renewed respect for policy.
Not learning. Not safety either, because most walkouts are organized, visible, and effectively supervised by sheer numbers and staff presence.
What’s being defended is compliance. Optics. The idea that rules must be seen enforcing themselves.
Consequences, we’re told, build character.
But decades of educational research and behavioral psychology have convoluted that fairy tale. Punitive discipline correlates with disengagement, not reflection. With alienation, not growth. We should understand by now, you don’t cultivate civic responsibility by criminalizing civic behavior. You just teach students that participation carries institutional risk.
And then there’s the contradiction no one likes naming, districts benefit financially from attendance, yet frame absence as a moral failure when that absence carries political meaning. Ditch class for no reason and it’s truancy policy. Ditch class to protest immigration raids affecting your family, your neighbors, your sense of security, and suddenly it’s framed as disruption requiring a correction.
Correction for what exactly? Caring too loudly?
The red city reflex leans predictable, order must be maintained. Precedent must be avoided. If you “reward” walkouts, chaos follows.
But incentivizing engagement is not the same as rewarding disobedience. Although some will see it as being too soft or too gentle. That framing reveals more about adult anxiety than student behavior. We already excuse absences for athletics, college tours, funerals, religious observances. We bend policy constantly when institutions value the activity. The outrage only surfaces when the activity challenges power rather than flatters it.
What if the response wasn’t consequential, but structure?
Designated civic expression protocols. Supervised walkout windows. Attendance neutrality for peaceful participation. Reflection assignments that connect action to curriculum rather than treating it as delinquency. In other words, acknowledge reality instead of staging disciplinary morality plays.
Because students are not confused about the stakes. They understand exactly why consequences appear. Walkouts are inconvenient. Politically charged. Administratively messy. Punishment becomes less about pedagogy than about sending a message to parents, boards, donors, voters.
We are still in control.
Except control is a brittle currency in environments meant to cultivate critical thinking. Schools teach government, rights, protest movements, constitutional protections then recoil when students practice the muscle memory of those lessons.
That’s the part that lands hollow.
If civic participation is only celebrated when it’s historical, sanitized, safely dead, is that really education, or just pageantry?
And teenagers can smell pageantry faster than anyone.
Decades of educational and behavioral research have repeatedly shown that punitive discipline correlates more strongly with disengagement than reflection.
Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.
