Dads on Duty: What America Needs More Of

Shreveport, LA — Southwood High School in Shreveport, Louisiana had a major problem with violence brewing last month.

In September, KSLA News reported on an especially bad day at the high school when 14 students were arrested during two fights that occurred on school grounds. In total, 23 students were arrested for fighting during a three-day span last month.

Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator said: “We had a fight at 9:30 (a.m.). I believe that there were seven kids that were. I call them kids, that sounds innocent. Seven of these thugs were expelled or sent home. A bigger fight started at 3 (p.m.). At that point we had ten or eleven units from CPSO had to come in from where we were patrolling to try and break up that fight. Then there were several more there who were sent home, there will be more that are expelled.”

Prator went on to say he fears these students will either end up in jail or dead if this continues.

“Southwood is one of the schools that we are trying to help with, but we have been having problems and fights with Southwood since the beginning of the school year,” Prator said. “We have a gang problem there. We have several gangs that are trying to one up each other and trying to act like grown men when they are just kids. We have got to somehow get a handle on the fact that this is illegal and disruptive behavior that they are involved in.”

A solution appears to have been found, and it didn’t come from any overpaid government school bureaucrat or any law enforcement official. No, it is coming from fathers doing their jobs, or more aptly “Dads on Duty.”

“Dads on Duty” is the name of a group of 40 fathers who are volunteering to work shifts in the school halls to monitor students as they pass to class, according to Christianity Daily. These fathers aren’t passively monitoring students, they’re engaging them going as far as telling “dad jokes” to brighten a student’s day.

Several of the dads involved spoke the CBS Evening News. When the reporter asked if any were school counselors, the answer was no. Asked if any were law enforcement, the answer was no. Asked what makes them qualified, Michael LaFitte simply said: “We’re dads.”

“We decided the best people who could take care of our kids are who? Are us,” LaFitte added.

Exactly right. These fathers didn’t need any certification from the government. They didn’t need to go massively in debt to gain some phony counseling degree from college. They simply needed to recognize they are fathers which comes with responsibility.

Students interviewed have felt the impact. The “Dads on Duty” began after that three-day span of arrests, and not one fight has occurred since.

“I immediately felt a form of safety,” one student said and another said: “We stopped fighting. People started going to class.”

“The school has just been like happy, and you can feel it,” another student said.

The “Dads on Duty” want to form chapters across Louisiana and possibly nationwide.

This story highlights what is needed in America, not just when it comes to education but well beyond. You don’t need any big government program to fix the problems in America. You don’t need taxpayers funding more police or more counselors. You need a sense of responsibility and intact family units. You also need to understand the roles of men and women because indeed, no matter what our society says, there are differences between the sexes.

Men need to understand that their role is as protector and provider. Women need to understand that their role is as nurturer and comforter.

Also, there needs to be an understanding that the issue that is really failing Americans is the family. Beyond issues of violence in schools, the problems of propaganda in the government schools can easily be solved by parents taking responsibility for their kids.

“Our schools have not failed. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and that is to keep the kids deliberately dumbed down, to accustom them to living in a locked down police environment with police around all the time, to condition them to go along with the peer pressure, with the mob and the rest of this stuff,” podcaster David Knight said. “No, that institution has not failed. It’s doing exactly what it was designed (to do) by people like (John) Dewey, Horace Mann and many others, a lot of the humanists from the early 20th century. It does exactly what it was designed to do.”

Knight added: “The institution, though, that has failed is the family. And it’s not just the black family, it’s every segment of society because we no longer value dads. But isn’t that an amazing story about how 40 dads working on a rotation were able to bring order there. Just a different approach. It’s a very different approach coming in as a dad than it is coming in as a police officer. It makes all the difference in the world.”

“Why can’t we learn the importance of the family? Why can’t we learn the importance of home schooling? See, that was originally the design that you would talk to your children, that you would engage them, that you would speak to them as you’re on your way …. Take your students, take your disciples or whatever and you walk along the way and you talk to them as you’re walking along. You explain what is happening as you walk through life with your kids. Why can’t we learn that? It’s such an important lesson to learn,” Knight concluded.

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