Education law toes the line

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: May 12, 2008

When the law, families and education intersect, as they do in America with increased frequency, ugly collisions are inevitable. A smashup in Ohio last week is a case in point. Bearing the sins of his daughter, who flouted a judicial mandate to acquire a General Equivalency Diploma, Brian Gegner today sits in a jail cell in Butler County, whose famed native sons include legendary football coach Weeb Ewbank and, now, the less genial David Niehaus.
The latter is the juvenile court judge who sent Gegner to the clink for six months over his adult daughter Brittany’s criminal recalcitrance in failing the math portion of her GED exams. The GED is awarded to those who pass a battery of tests demonstrating high school-level academic skills. Brittany’s skills have been found wanting in the wake of her reluctance to attend classes at Fairfield High School and Butler Tech. The truancy prompted the court order that put Gegner behind bars.
Brittany, 18, and her mother, Shana Roach, from whom Brian Gegner is estranged, say he is being unjustly punished. Although Gegner has custody of his daughter, she was residing with her mother at the time of her truancy, both women say. “They probably should have punished me if they were going to punish anybody,” Shana Roach told a television reporter.
Nothing succeeds like government in transforming everyday folk into criminals, victims or both. No one, of course, talks of punishing the wayward child, whose personal struggles might be considered a sufficient sentence. That logic might unilaterally be applied in the Gegner case, but such would require cognition of facts and their product, reality, which haunts the governed to the precise extent that it eludes those who govern.
Among the facts in Ohio, one is particularly telling: Brittany Gegner was 16 at the time she skipped classes, an age when teenagers in a half-dozen states are legally considered capable of making decisions absent parental influence about whether to undergo an abortion but not so about whether to attend high school. The reality is that the law can require physical but not intellectual attendance. As Brittany demonstrates, some free spirits cannot be compelled to attend even in body.
In this era of leaving no children behind, some questions take the form of blasphemy, but we will pose one nonetheless: Why force those who reject the necessity of secondary education upon those who relish or at least concede it? Classrooms across America are clogged with students who are present purely as a matter of law and so spend their days subverting the education of their interested peers. That group, in turn, is left behind amid the quest to move forward the herd.
Lost upon the courts is the reality of individual responsibility, something Brittany Gegner recognizes. By her own estimation, she failed her father, 18-month-old daughter and, ultimately, herself. She vows she will obtain her GED. Until she does, Brian Gegner will sit in a jail alongside thieves, drug dealers and other ne’er-do-wells.
Punishment in cases such as this one should be reserved for the government behemoth, fatted as it is from wanton feeding on the freedoms of the people it is pledged to serve. The beast should be forced to subsist within the limits provided in the Constitution, and those who feed its excesses should be cast from the realm of governance into that of the reality in which the remainder of us reside.