RSSNow Kids are Banned from Sledding at Raynham Middle School in MA … When will the Nanny State Ever Stop?
Sledding outlawed at Raynham Middle School in Massachusetts. Are you serious? You call that a dangerous hill? That thing is nothing compared to the hills that I sledded on when I was a child. Oh my, a child might get hurt. Wow, like that was not a right of passage as a youngster back in the day. Obviously today’s “nanny” state would not appreciate our tree luge slalom racing through the woods similar to this except going down a much steeper mountain, nor the jumps we used to add to the hills. We would have been considered hardened criminals.
Raynham school officials are trying to stop daredevils from sledding down a dangerous hill.
“There’s nowhere else as good as this. This is the biggest hill,” explained a teenager who showed us the scrapes on his chin from a fall.
The trails on the hill behind Raynham Middle School lead right to a parking lot at the bottom. “It proceeds directly into an area where there are vehicles,” said school committee member Gordon Luciano.
“We’ve had incidents where sleds are crashing into vehicles…numerous accidents, ambulance calls.”
School officials even sent an email notifying residents that sledding has been banned in the popular spot. That didn’t stop a crowd from gathering there during a snow day Thursday.
Go figure, emails didn’t stop kids from sledding after a foot of snow fell. SHOCKER!!! So what will schools ban next, dodge ball? Oh that’s right, they already did. How about sticking one’s tongue to a cold flag pole?
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10 Responses to “Now Kids are Banned from Sledding at Raynham Middle School in MA … When will the Nanny State Ever Stop?”
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I remember a hill in NJ they called “the nutcracker”. It was a very steep incline with a jump at the bottom. You had to work up some nerve to go down it the first time. I bent the runners on my sled going over that thing. It was a blast. I’m so fortunate there was no one there too save me from myself!
Hey, can you blame the ‘Nanny State’ teachers from
teaching kids to be ‘Nannies’?
Nanny State Schools make ‘Nannys’ out of the students.
I hear what you are saying, let kids be kids, etc. BUT if the hill ends on school property, the school has a legal duty to prevent kids from sledding – since an injury could result in a massive lawsuit of the taxpayers – and yes, some judge or jury would award millions. This is especially true since the school has witnessed the previous accidents and therefore a court could say – “warned” about the danger.
Look at some of the cases involving city reservoirs where even with high cyclone fences, the reservoir was declared an attractive nuisance and lawsuits against the city for drownings (after climbing the cyclone fence) were upheld.
#2, i hear what you are also saying. It just shows how much the times have changed. I grew up in snow country and this type of stuff was common place.
Actually this hill they are showing is a knoll, compared to the ones we sledded on in Middle School.
R
Maybe to prevent kids from getting seriously injured or killed by a car or truck?
Yep. When I grew up, kids could be kids too. We ice skated on farmers’ ponds, sled where ever there was a hill, played in the lemon grove and could eat the homemade cookies and other treats passed out by Halloween. No one worried too much about the neighbor down the street being a creep. We played in unfenced backyards and front yards.
Unfortunately our society turns out sick perverts and has become extremely litigious.
Kat,
We used to sled on school property all the time. The school knew we played there winter and summer, and no one ran us off. I remember when one kid went sledding right through a chain link fence and the EMTs had to come cut him out of it. Hurt him pretty bad. I don’t know if a lawsuit resulted from that or not, but everyone continued to sled there and word was passed to be a little cautious about that fence. I’ll bet the parents didn’t sue because it was the kid’s fault and he accepted the risk of sledding there. That’s the way things were handled back then, but you are right – “our society … has become extremely litigous”.
You can blame this on lawyers and the courts.
Once upon a time, parents took full responsibility for the actions, good and bad, of their children. Children could be themselves and if they got hurt the parents did what was necessary to make them well. If the child damaged the property of others, parents went to the damaged party and worked out a way to fix the damage.
Then the law schools turned out too many lawyers that could not make a living handling contracts and actual criminal practice. Looking around for a source of revenue, they became ambulance chasers and liability whores who looked to make big bucks, whereever they could be stolen from, with the aid of their buddies on the bench.
Wow, americans already jump when there’s a trace of any kind of potential threat (there’s outright PANIC when another country says boo or when we run out of ANYTHING) and our generation was way less coddled than this one. Almost makes raising your kids away from society make perfect sense.