Whacky in Waco and Elsewhere

Yesterday I posted “This had me LOL.” I was laughing after reading a very funny satire which included:

Scenario: Parents take cute pictures of their 2 year-old playing in the tub.

1965 Parents go to Walgreen's, get them developed, and put them in the child's picture album which is shared with friends and relatives.

2006 Parents reported by Walgreen's to the Police, arrested for child pornography, and child sent to foster care.


Scenario: Mark gets a headache and his Mother gives him some aspirin to take to school.

1965 Mark's headache persists. He goes to his locker, gets a couple of aspirin and takes them at the water fountain.

2006 Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.

Today, I read “a real world” story that didn’t leave me laughing. The AP reports from Waco, Texas:

WACO - School administrators gave a 4-year-old student an in-school suspension for inappropriately touching a teacher's aide after the pre-kindergartner hugged the woman.

A letter from La Vega school district administrators to the student's parents said that the boy was involved in "inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment" after he hugged the woman and he "rubbed his face in the chest of (the) female employee" on Nov. 10.

DaMarcus Blackwell, the father of the boy who attends La Vega Primary School, said he filed a complaint with the district. He said that his son doesn't understand why he was punished.

"When I got that letter, my world flipped," Blackwell said in a story in Sunday's editions of the Waco Tribune-Herald.

La Vega school district officials said student privacy laws prevented them from commenting.

After Blackwell filed a complaint, a subsequent letter from the district said the offense had been changed to "inappropriate physical contact" and removed references of sexual contact or sexual harassment from the boy's file.

Administrators said the district's student handbook contains no specific guidelines referring to contact between teachers and students but does state that inappropriate physical contact will result in a discipline referral.

The La Vega school district, which has five schools, covers about 30 miles around Waco.

We can’t be sure what the child actually did. But unless the AP got the story very wrong (yes, that happens), the school system wrote the child’s father a letter about “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment" and then backed off of the “interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment” part of the letter when the father complained.

What’s “interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment" behavior by a four year old? If you're going to use explosive, stigmatizing terms such as “sexual contact” and “sexual harassment” to describe a child’s behavior, shouldn’t you be damn sure the behavior actually involved sexual contact and sexual harassment?

If I were a parent and had gotten either version of the letter, I’d have been very upset and asked: “What did my child actually do?” I’d also want to know why the school didn’t call me before sending the letter.

I wish the story had said whether school personnel sent the first letter as a result of their professional judgment of what was the appropriate way to contact the parent; or whether they were following a school system policy that says whenever you suspend a student you must inform the parent in writing.

Most school systems have such a policy but it shouldn’t excuse school personnel from also phoning a parent to explain the reason for the letter and inviting the parent to school to discuss the child’s behavior.

Getting back to the 1965 – 2006 satire: Where’s a society headed when it has school systems in Waco and most other places in America sending home in-school suspension letters to the parents of four and five year olds while those same school systems don’t inform a parent when a school counselor contacts a social worker and other “helping persons” to discuss how they’ll “help” a fifteen year old obtain an abortion?

There’s a lot whacky in Waco and elsewhere in America.

I learned of the story from Betsy Newmark's post: "No tolerance policies run amuk." I hope you give it a look.