Unidentified boy from Visitors’ Section: No way is it far-fetched! Take a look at this! (Alistair drags his backpack up and plops it on the marble floor in front of the bench.)


My backpack. I brought it all the way from Los Angeles to show you. Had to pay an excess baggage fee at the airport. Every day I drag this thing to school and back home again. It gives me a crick in the neck. Not to mention the long-term damage I imagine it’s doing to my spine. And I’m not the only one. Kids all over the country carry this much and more. They’re weighing in on our website. Sean, what’s the national total up to?


Other unidentified boy from Visitors’ Section: 230,456,474 pounds on the backs of school children across America.


Unidentified boy from Visitors’ Section: If that’s not cruel and unusual punishment, what is?


(There is another pause. This time it’s the justices who are speechless.)


Sadie Warren: Thank you, Alistair. Besides the bodily damage it does, homework has a negative impact on emotional health too. If you could visit the homes of school-age children after school, you’d hear small fists pounding tables in frustration. You’d smell coffee being brewed by eleven-year-olds desperate to study for one more test, complete one more task. And you’d see bedside clocks showing one a.m. next to empty beds, where teenagers should be sleeping, but instead they’re hunched over desks, battling a deadline.


(She waits for another pitch, but none comes.)


Sadie Warren: Moving on, if I may, to a purely legal argument, there is also the privacy question. (We all look over at Justice DeFazio now.)


We accept that kids have to go to school. It’s the law, and it gives them the benefit of an education – Justice Cohen: While allowing their parents to work.


Sadie Warren: Yes, Justice Cohen, but we feel that just as their parents get off work at, say, five or six o’clock, students should have away time too. And that away time should be free of intrusion by the state. In this case, the schools.


108


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