A group of teenagers recently broke into the Robert Frost School and vandalized the facility to the tune of $100,000 or more. While there is plenty of blame to go around in assessing who is responsible for allowing this to happen, it took some good old fashioned common sense from an unlikely source to put things in perspective.

School Committeewoman Martha Previte says the parents of these thugs should be made to repay the school system for the damage their little monsters have caused. She says we need a policy that holds parents responsible for the actions of their minor children. She says she is fed up and she is right.

Two of Previte’s colleagues, however disagree. School board members Suzanne Piscitello and Nancy Kennedy say we should not make parents pay for the crimes of their teenagers. That’s right! Two parents on the Lawrence School Committee say that the mothers and fathers of these criminals should not be held financially accountable for the damage done by their kids.

According to the daily paper, Ms. Piscitello said that we do not know how "heart broken" these parents must be about the incident. Well, if they are so heart broken, let them step up to the plate and take financial responsibility for the kids who were supposed to be in their care and control when this vandalism happened. Let them come to a School Committee meeting with their kids and make the teenagers publicly apologize for their misdeeds. That’s what a god parent would do if they were heart broken about the vandalism done by their children. A good parent would use shame and humiliation to teach them a lesson.

I mean, according to Suzanne Piscitello, the parents are the real victims here. I can just picture these icons of morality who bring their children to church every Sunday and teach them right from wrong just balling their eyes out that their little angels could have done this. Given the lack of respect these kids have for authority and their apparent willingness to break the law at such an early age, I cannot believe for a minute that each of these kids are the product of good parenting who simply made a mistake.

I am not saying that the parents are directly responsible for the actions of their kids 24 hours a day. Only these teen age thugs are truly responsible for what they did. They knew it was wrong and they chose to do it anyways. What I am saying is, the parents must be held responsible when their kids go wrong. We don’t know if some of these parents are indeed good parents or they are lousy parents who just don’t give a damn. But, we do know that holding the parents responsible will force other parents to take this behavior more seriously because they will suffer the consequences if they don’t.

We use our school system for every social program in the world saying that we have an obligation to help these kids with everything from teen pregnancy to drug dependence. It’s time we use the schools to do something they were designed to do: teach. By imposing a parental responsibility policy we will be teaching bad parents to pay more attention to the behavior of their kids. They will have to or they will pay up. We will teach the children that there are real consequences to their actions. Especially when their parents come down hard on them for the $100,000 price tag they will have to pay.

Just ask any police officer who has ever had to arrest a teen or bring them home for committing a similar crime and they will tell you of parents who say "not my child, he would never do that." Ask any teacher or school official who deals with kids on a daily basis and they will tell you that there are many parents who are completely disengaged from their children’s activities and behaviors. And that the attitudes of these parents are the direct cause of their children’s lack of impulse control, bad behavior and disrespect for autority.

Sure, the good parents will correct the problem right away and they will be taking steps to correct their child’s behavior. But, the lousy parents will shrug it off and go back to their selfish lives of ignoring their kids and defending them when they are wrong because it’s so much easier to do so. The children of these parents are the ones police officers arrest over and over resulting in a life of crime. They are the ones that teachers and educators remove from the classroom on a daily basis for fighting or disrupting the classroom. They are the ones who need someone to force their parents to do the right thing and punish their children appropriately.

These lousy parents are the ones we have to focus on. These are the parents we must think about when an incident like this occurs. Martha Previte is absolutely right, the parents are the source of the problem and making them take responsibility is the only solution. In the mean time, placing security guards back in the schools might be a good idea.