A learning-disabled 15-year-old Pennsylvania sophomore was threatened with felony wiretapping charges for using his school-approved iPad to record being bullied by other students.
After his numerous reports to teachers went unheeded, the student, who has not been identified, decided to take matters into his own hands after repeatedly being tripped, pushed, insulted, nearly burned with a cigarette lighter, and generally bullied since moving to the South Fayette School District 20 minutes outside Pittsburgh.
“I was really having things like books slammed upside my head,” the teen said in a benswann.com report. “I wanted it to stop. I just felt like nothing was being done.”
The student told his mother about the bullying and, to prove he wasn’t making the stories up, recorded an incident during class with his iPad’s audio recording function, which captured students making mean and harassing comments and even pretending to strike him in order to frighten.
“According to [the student's mother], as the teacher is heard attempting to help her son with a math problem, a student says, ‘You should pull his pants down!’ Another student replies, ‘No, man. Imagine how bad that (c**t) smells! No one wants to smell that (t**t).’ As the recording continues, the teacher instructs the classroom that they may only talk if it pertains to math.
Shortly thereafter, a loud noise is heard on the recording, which her son explained was a book being slammed down next to him after a student pretended to hit him in the head with it. When the teacher yells, the student exclaims, ‘What? I was just trying to scare him!’ A group of boys are heard laughing.”Obviously this is the retarded kids fault. After all his parents are the ones who hate him enough to send him to a public school in the first place. Child abuse starts when you put your kid on the yellow bus. I guess the good news is that the judge found the retarded kid guilty of the reduced charge of disorderly conduct. Good thing the principle erased the evidence of bullying, otherwise the wiretapping charges may have stuck.
In other news, the Nevada division of the Bureau of Land Management has offered summer internships to the bully's.
You're kidding! I can't believe the BLM would hire these kids.
ReplyDeleteIt's not even close to wiretapping. Public place, recording public conversations that were in the proximity of the person doing the recording.
ReplyDeleteWhat is wrong with judges that they can't throw stuff like this out of court and cite the principal and lawyers for contempt?
It's not even close to wiretapping. Public place, recording public conversations that were in the proximity of the person doing the recording.
ReplyDeleteWhat is wrong with judges that they can't throw stuff like this out of court and cite the principal and lawyers for contempt?
That's what I thought. The judge should have thrown the book at the prosecutor. They took a retarded kid and questioned him with out a lawyer or even his mom knowing about it and then convicted him.
ReplyDelete"First, God created idiots. That was for practice. Then, He created school boards." -- Mark Twain
ReplyDeleteTar. Feathers. Some assembly required.
When I read stuff like this, I just thank my lucky stars that my kids grew up in a time when this stuff wasn't a regular occurrence in the schools.
ReplyDeleteI guess nobody has ever thought to tell the parents of these kids that everyone, and I mean everyone, is one bad head trauma away from being that retarded kid. Just because you are what society would call "mentally healthy" now doesn't mean that tomorrow you will be the same.
It makes me wonder when I think about that passage that says "judge not lest you be so judged", that God might just give these boys a taste of their own medicine someday to see how they like it. Maybe walking a mile in this boy's mental shoes will give them a Damascus road of their own.
Prof. Hale,
ReplyDeleteI don't think the principal was worried about the legalities of recording so much as he himself was being exposed for the sloppy school administrator that he is.
I found out early on that school principals hate being made to look bad under any circumstances.