School bans hugging!

Yvonne Tahana reports:

North Shore students have been banned from hugging during school hours because too many of them – mainly girls – were consistently arriving late to their classes.

Umm, then you should ban being late to class – but not ban hugging.

A trend among groups of year 8 students – 12- to 13-year-olds – had driven the call, Mrs Cattell said.

“It’s just a little thing that they’re doing. It got out of hand towards the end of morning tea time especially. There would be groups that got back to class 10 to 15 minutes late because they were going around making sure they’d hugged the whole group before they got back to class.

I think hugging is a very healthy positive activity. It’s great kids want to show their friendship for each other with hugs.

More than 600 attend the school and there were also concerns that some children’s feelings could be hurt if they were left out.

Oh dear God.

Parent Lorna Subritsky, whose daughter attends the school, said she could understand it might be annoying for teachers for have stragglers to their classes but the issue could be dealt with by addressing the lateness, not the physical contact.

Exactly.