Posted on 04/20/2005 5:47:33 AM PDT by The Great Yazoo
The horror that happened at Mifflin High School in Columbus, Ohio, is happening in public schools everywhere. While the names and ages of the young victims vary, one thing is constant across the country: spineless education bureaucrats more concerned about covering their hides than protecting innocent children from harm.
On March 9, according to press reports, a developmentally disabled girl told Mifflin school officials that four boys dragged her into the school auditorium, punched her in the head and face, pushed her to her knees, and forced her to have oral sex with two of them. A crowd of students watched, and one student videotaped the incident. The 16-year-old girl's lip was bloodied in the alleged gang attack; dazed and crying, her face swollen, she reported the assault immediately to her special education teacher, Lisa Upshaw-Haider.
One monstrosity was piled upon another. When the girl's father, who had been summoned to the school by the teacher, insisted on calling police, an assistant principal twice urged him not to call 911, according to Upshaw-Haider. Assistant Principal Rick Watson implored the girl's father to call the non-emergency police line instead of 911, a violation of Ohio state law, because "a news channel might tape his daughter and cause her further mental trauma," according to his statement to school investigators.
Meanwhile, according to witnesses, the school's principal, Regina Crenshaw, shuttered herself in a meeting about bell schedules and curriculum for a half-hour while underlings scrambled to perform damage control.
Cover your ears, cower in a classroom, and pray that the media stay out of it. It's all about the children, right?
Witness statements revealed that none of the administrators bothered to call a nurse to assist the girl. Only after the girl's father called police himself did law enforcement come to the scene. By the time the cops arrived, all of the administrators had gone home for the day.
The principal is now in the process of being fired. The animals accused of assaulting the victim were suspended and may face criminal charges. But two of three assistant principals, including alleged cover-up man Rick Watson, are protesting their measly suspensions over the incident as "unwarranted." Worried as ever about his own hide, Watson said through a lawyer that he hoped to be "spared the public ordeal of a full hearing."
What about the girl's ordeal? As is frequently the case in these situations, this was probably not the first time the disabled student was attacked. Police are investigating claims that she had been previously assaulted on a school bus, and that boys had tried to disrobe her at school.
Public-school Pollyannas will dismiss the Mifflin High School horror story as an isolated case. Open your eyes. Smell the stench. It's in your neighborhood.
The New York Post reported recently that assaulted or sexually abused students and staff members collected $6.9 million in negligence claims against the New York City school system in fiscal 2004, an 18 percent increase in payouts over the previous fiscal year. The largest settlement, $1 million, was awarded to a Bronx high school student whose classmates stabbed him in the head with a screwdriver. The school had refused his mother's request for a safety transfer before the assault.
In my home county, Montgomery County, Md., a local government report revealed that nearly 12,000 children ages 12 to 17 are bullied, abused or robbed by peers and others. Of that number, more than 1,000 are victims of sexual assaults. The school system, which is not required to inform police of these crimes, has been bombarded with complaints by parents that school officials ignored the victims or downplayed sexual assaults, including a number of incidents involving young girls attacked on local school buses.
These are heart-stopping nightmares every parent fears. You send your children to school to learn, not to be assaulted by classmates and abused by the negligent overseers of Public School Classrooms Gone Wild. If these assaults occurred in private schools, the institutions would be shut down. Instead, the government dance of the lemons continues, as abominable administrators skip away with "sensitivity training," "reassignment," and eternal protection from accountability.
Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com
©2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Some people simply do not know how to apply disciplinary measures when the situation calls for it. The school administrators considered this to be a "time out", instead of the juvenile crime that it was.
The young girl was CLEARLY the victim of unwanted sexual attention, an event that would have resulted in the firing or civil suit against an adult engaged in similar bad behavior. Since no adults are involved here at the level of the infraction, it falls on those who are in authority as "in loco parentis".
The school authorities were plainly dodging their collective duty.
Liberal democrats and the teachers unions have transformed the public school system into nothing more than a warehouse for little gangsters who worship Snoop Dog and Fifty Cent but don't have a clue who Thomas Jefferson or Benjamen Franklin were.
During what time period, I wonder? Monthly, annually, since 1990?
Not that I disagree with her general point (my kids don't go to schoo :-), but this was clearly edited in haste.
I agree with your assessment of the editing of this - and I agree with Malkin's premise - and my child is in public school.
Another fine example of the money pit called public education...
Yet I suspect this same school administration rigidly enforces "zero tolerance" policies regarding drugs and "weapons" to the point where an honor student using a pen knife to clean violin strings would be expelled, smeared, and referred to the police. Liberalism is rot. They wallow in orgiastic pleasure when they make and ruthlessly enforce asinine rules against the law abiding, but consistently refuse to use appropriate discipline and penalties against the real thugs and criminals.
You won't get an argument from me on that.
MAY face charges?
Please, these children were only engaged in extra-curricular sex education experiments. This is not the henious case of a boy scout leader bringing a camping axe to school in his truck and leaving it there, a truly horrible crime deserving the severerst possible punishment under the school's "zero tolerance" policy for "weapons."
This young girl was raped, raped and humiliated while in the charge of her school.
Pretty damned sad that this is trivialized with lessening terms. Pretty damn sad. Its past time that people start holding those accountable, accountable for their actions or lack of actions. I support the father starting his vengance with a baseball bat and moving up from there.
What if this were your daughter?
Somehow I didn't catch the reaction of any NOW representative. Of course, this doesn't compare to the ignominy of Bob Packwood tongue kissing an adult employee twenty years ago. Then again, that was before the Age of Clinton. Now we know that these acts don't constitute sex.
Parents who let this happen to their daughter while under their supervision would be in jail, and probably never see their children again. These school employees just get to shrug ... and the chance of real consequences for the perps - hah!
I believe I would have given them a reason to call 911 after I started to open up a can of whoop ass on some of those administrators, beginning with that bozo who asked the dad not to use 911.
It seems to me in this particular case the father did no wrong - he is the one that did the job the school administrators failed to do.
When an article about this first appeared my 4 word response was "Lock'em all up".........the administrators and the youthful perps.
That's the purpose of zero tolerance. An A student with a small, harmless incident is easier to punish and use as an example than some ghetto head whose parents will sue just to get some pocket change.
yes, of course. the children were only 'acting out' symbolic reparations for the oppressed plight of all minorities throughout the world throughout history.
clearly the media induced uproar is a transparent attempt by the Bush administration to silence the Black community.
I think we can all agree the child with the video recorder and the little child accused by the special education student are the real victims here.
yes, of course. the children were only 'acting out' symbolic reparations for the oppressed plight of all minorities throughout the world throughout history.
clearly the media induced uproar is a transparent attempt by the Bush administration to silence the Black community.
I think we can all agree the child with the video recorder and the little child accused by the special education student are the real victims here.
What? The school system is not required to report crimes? I wonder how that particular loophole got into the law. You can be sure that anyone in a private organization who covered up violent crimes would be in deep trouble.
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