Police class

Teens cannot bear burden of troubled interactions.

Texas Sen. John Whitmire has never been one to bend under the weight of authority. During his 40-plus years in elected office, the Dean of the Senate has stood up to governors, speakers and even his peers. It’s the sort of always-questioning attitude that our state should hope to imbue in the next generation of leaders making their way through our public schools.

So it is with a sense of irony that we’re watching Houston’s Whitmire work with Dallas-area state Sen. Royce West to pass a bill that teaches students to shut their mouths and submit to government authority.

Senate Bill 30, which has a hearing today, would require public schools to teach students how to interact with police officers. State funding cuts and recaptured property taxes have already stretched our local school budgets to a breaking point. The last thing we need is another unfunded mandate from Austin.

There’s no easy answer to issues of police-civilian interaction, but we know that the burden of solving the problem shouldn’t fall on teachers and teenagers.

Yes, too many students view the police through a lens of fear. Far too many parents have to sit their kids down and give them “The Talk” about how they should act around the police. Whitmire and West should be working with police departments to make these talks a thing of the past — not a permanent part of the Texas curriculum.

Beyond school issues, the bill isn’t all bad. SB 30 expands driver education courses and safety courses to cover proper law enforcement procedure during traffic stops — the only time plenty of Texans ever interact directly with police.

The bill also requires that officers take civilian interaction training. That’s where the real responsibility belongs. Adults bear the burden of keeping their cool when teenagers act up.

There was a time when generations of Texas school kids learned about police shootings by reading S.E. Hinton’s comingof-age classic, “The Outsiders.”

Today’s students probably learned from reading headlines about Trayvon Martin. However, a new wave of young adult novels, like Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give,” Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely’s “All American Boys” and Kekla Magoon’s “How It Went Down,” has hit bookshelves for the generation growing up in an age of Sandra Bland.

Rather than handing off another one of society’s problems to our already overburdened public schools, Whitmire should take it upon himself to ensure that students have access to these books.

Literature can help kids understand the complexity of the world around them. Class discussion and reflection help lead them down their own paths to adulthood.

This bill just makes for bored students.