Last week I was exploding over the incredible overreaction of one school principal who made a nine-year old boy cry while threatening him with suspension because he was carrying a two-inch long LEGO gun at school. In my opinion, that principal took the zero-tolerance gun policy to the extreme and now it appears she has brethren in art of overreaction at other schools.
Alexa Gomez, age twelve, doodled on her desk with erasable pen and was hauled out of school to the police station in handcuffs for her offence.
HANDCUFFED. TO A POLICE STATION.
Alexa claims she was bored while her Spanish teacher was handing out homework assignments and used her erasable pen to write 'Lex was here. 2/1/10' and punctuated it with a villainous sounding smiley face. You know that she just did it in order to stake her gang territory in addition to spreading hate with that smiley face. Obviously!
Because what else could the school administration think she was doing besides acting like a gang member or criminal thug considering they had her arrested -- put in handcuffs -- and taken to the local precinct where she was held for several hours?
Now before you think 'Wow, she must have been some kind of hardened juvenile delinquent that the school must have been waiting to nail with some kind of criminal offence in order to deserve that over the top treatment for a couple of erasable doodles on school property', that does not appear to be the case. Alexa has 'a stellar attendance record' and sounds pretty average and normal when it comes to students. Nary a whiff of delinquent behaviours in the article.
But! Lo! This isn't the first time it's happened. A unidentified twelve-year old involved in a pending lawsuit against a different school also was arrested for the same kind of minor action on the scale of defacing of school property crimes. My mind. It spins.
Alexa is currently suspended from school for her crime. Actions that sounded more worthy of a detention that should have included awhole lot of desk scrubbing instead of a traumatic, life-altering, stress-inducing arrest and threats of criminal charges.
Is it just me, or are schools trying to make regular students hate educational institutions? Again: my mind. It boggles. If this was the way things were when I was a student, I'd be in the big house right now. Seriously.
Good lord!!! If stuff like that happened when I was at school I'd have been sentenced with the death penalty and executed! My BFF & I once super glued a ruler to the table in music. We only got told "I'm very disappointed in the both of you ". I won't even go into what else we did!
I think schools take things way too far. This story is just unbelievable!!
Posted by: Becca_Masters | 02/08/2010 at 02:56 PM
Wow. While I understand that in some areas, you need to have zero tolerance and can't draw subjective distinctions between a doddle and a tag, I also think that even for a tag, that would be overreacting. It wouldn't hurt some budding gang member much to scrub some desks after school, either. Yikes.
Posted by: kittenpie | 02/08/2010 at 03:02 PM
@Becca_Masters I agree! I wasnt kidding, Id be in maximum security prison by now -- without a high school diploma -- if this is how they treated me back in the day.
Posted by: motherbumper | 02/08/2010 at 03:21 PM