Slashdot Mirror
Texas Boy Suspended For "Threatening" Classmate With the One Ring
An anonymous reader writes Nine-year-old Aiden Steward has been suspended by officials at a Texas school after he allegedly threatened to use his magic ring to make another boy disappear. His father says the family had watched The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies last weekend. His son brought a ring to class and told another boy his magic ring could make the boy disappear. "I assure you my son lacks the magical powers necessary to threaten his friend's existence," Aiden's father wrote in an email. "If he did, I'm sure he'd bring him right back." Principal Roxanne Greer declined to comment on the school's zero tolerance policy on magic rings. It may seem easy to make fun of Principal Greer in this case, but it does make one wonder how many elves could have been saved if someone took a hard line with a young Sauron.
Seeing that this is Texas he should have just said that "God will strike down the unbeliever" and left it at that.
I'd love to see this zero tolerance policy come up against religious freedom.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Not that anyone should ever actually do such a horrible thing, of course, but HYPOTHETICALLY, I would take a certain pleasure in seeing a massive doxxing campaign against principals and other officials on state payrolls who make such stupid decisions and hide behind bad policy. You know just to provide some incentive the other direction and reap a little justice at the same time. Not that I would ever advocate such a thing, because of course I wouldn't, of course.
Credible threats have consequences. Threatening to magically make someone magically vanish lacks credibility.
How can the rules distinguish between Humor/Fake/Play threats, and real Bullying?
I think any reasonable person would believe the threat to magically disappear someone would be imaginary and non-credible.
Just like you would probably laugh if your next door neighbor tried to threaten you with Thermonuclear destruction.
But what if the victim was gullible, and the kid kept coming up with new imaginary threats to intimidate him?
Such cases can't entirely be dismissed, if there is a legitimate pattern of bullying or intentional intimidation.
So I guess it's appropriate that the principal is a muppet.
Since you bring race into it, there is a journalist I heard on NPR who studied black crime and police. The problem has little to do with white folks in the communities she worked with. Most black crime is black on black. The families living in these areas would much prefer more police protection. However, the police don't have the street level view of the crimes that are being committed. Nor can they protect witnesses very well when the witnesses live with the perps. The witnesses are intimidated into shutting up. The police, not being able to get inside information, wind up cracking down on the crimes they can see in the hopes of putting at least some of the perps behind bars. That leaves the black community feeling the police are only arbitrarily enforcing petty crimes and some how don't want to arrest the real perps.
That said, the police depts have their own internal problems. At least in parts of L.A., there are different units assigned to murders than to gang activity and the two do not communicate very well. Police depts. need to be reorganized to streamline communication, but communities must also rat out the perps in their midst. As long as the communities do not feel like police can protect them against retribution, that won't happen.
You can see a microcosm of this playing out in the prisons. These are captive populations with plenty of cops, yet inside the inmates run their own justice system and the cops cannot protect inmates from retribution. When the society gets that evil, it is very difficult to fix.
One of my sons was expelled from the highschool the day after the Columbine shootings because had previously owned a trench coat that he had out grown and hadn't owned for nearly a year. The expulsion only lasted half a day before someone came to our house and apologized as the principal had over stepped his authority when he expelled every student that had ever worn a trench coat to school. That was also his last year as principal.
He was also suspended for wearing a pentacle by a vice principal wearing great big honking cross. After a lengthy explanation about religious symbols used as gang signs from her I simply told her she's not suspending him and will never mention it again unless she intends to suspends every person wearing a cross. She started to try and convince me that was different and I cut her off and cautioned her that there wasn't any argument she could give that wouldn't make me want to see her fired.
First, I'd like to point out we're hearing a third-hand rendition of what happened in each case. The kid told his parents told the media why he got suspended.
Black isn't a racial slur. The name of the race on the US Census is "Black or African American". The only way it could possibly be okay to suspend him is if he repeatedly and with intent to harass called someone who didn't like being called black, black. Did this happen, or is some teacher using her power to engage in a personal vendetta against a word she doesn't like but is generally considered acceptable? I don't know. Like I said, we know one side of the story.
Maybe, in this most recent case, the kid actually, for fun, tormented a superstitious classmate into thinking he was really in danger of being exiled from existence due to black magic.
TLDR: Many kids are assholes. Many teachers are assholes. Parents will never admit, due to myopia, that their kids are assholes. Schools will never admit, for legal and union reasons, that their teachers are assholes. Who was an asshole here? We'll never know. But I do assure, someone was.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Our ability to learn of crime has vastly outgrown the actual crime rate. Crimes are going down, but reporting/knowledge of the events is growing exponentially.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Take a stand, have a moral compass, do the right thing, not the easy thing. "Just following orders" when herding the children into camps is not behavior anyone would consider laudable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.