My partner is in an apprenticeship program for electrical and plumbing. We’re in a city so large, with so many tradespeople, that a given field has multiple unions within the same metro area. What you’re describing is not at all anyone’s experience in this area of the U.S.

Must be a state by state thing. My partner recently moved to trades from another career, and it’s correct that you get put on a list of apprenticeship positions, but they employ you to actively do work the entire time.

I had a gym teacher who was not really interested in being a gym teacher. He was the varsity football coach and that was where his main focus was. Gym/Health class was basically the bare minimum health information required by curriculum, and then the rest of the time was spent in the weight room. Not even doing like, fun games or anything like that, literally just ‘weight room’ so that his athletes could just use the hour for their workout time.

One day, after ‘weight room’ another student who was held back a bit (he had reached maybe 20 y.o. at this point, and hadn’t graduated) made a joke about wanting to shower with people. Nobody thought it was funny, we all ignored him. He takes offense to this, and decides to vent that frustration on me. He grabs me by the side of the head, and slams my head into the locker next to me. He does this within full view of the teacher, maybe ten feet away if that. I walk over to the teacher, holding my rapidly bruising face, and repeat to him what happened, literally what he just witnessed.

He looked me in the eyes and said “Yeah, and?” and refused to do anything about it.

I went to the Principal, who didn’t do anything. I went to the Vice Principal, who didn’t do anything, and then I went to the Dean of Students, who got that kid pulled from class for three days total. The next week I had a sit down with the Principal who apologized for what happened, but was oh so thankful that I was such an understanding kid, and could empathize with my assailant’s mental handicaps, and this didn’t need to go any further than it did, right?

Shoulda sued.