So, the "Dumbass of the Week" category is taken. Can I initiate the "Surreal School Overreaction of the Week" award? Because this one definitely deserves that prize (via Best of the Web):
The Fulton County school system on Friday temporarily rescinded the expulsion of a Roswell High School freshman who wrote a fictional tale in her private journal about a student who dreams she kills a teacher.
Ok. Stop. Right. There. A student was expelled because she wrote in a private journal about a fictional character who dreams about killing a teacher? How many steps removed from reality, not to mention any concept of reasonable privacy, did this school have to be to decide that this warranted expulsion in the first place?
Here's the original story:
Rachel Boim, 14, who moved here from suburban Denver, about 20 minutes from Columbine High School, was expelled after a closed, three-hour hearing conducted Wednesday by a Fulton County school system official.
School system spokeswoman Susan Hale said the expulsion was for "inappropriate writings that describe the threat of bodily harm toward a school employee."
"Anytime the safety and security of our students and staff are put into question, we investigate the situation and, if warranted, take serious action," Hale said. "After reviewing the evidence, the hearing officer felt expulsion was an appropriate disciplinary response."
Wednesday's hearing included testimony from Rachel's parents, Georgia's poet laureate and an editor of Five Points, a literary magazine published by Georgia State University. They all testified that the girl's story was nothing more than a work of fiction in a journal filled with drawings, coloring, poems and other creative expression...
The journal entry describes a student, who is unnamed, having a dream while asleep in class. In the dream, the student shoots a teacher and then runs out of the classroom, only to be killed by a security guard...The journal does not name a specific teacher...
David Boim said his daughter often carries her personal journal and did not have it in class as part of an assignment when it was confiscated Oct. 7. Art teacher Travis Carr took the journal during the class because Rachel was passing it to a classmate, Boim said.
Carr kept the journal overnight, and on Oct. 8 Rachel was taken from her second-period class by school police and her parents were summoned to the school.
If I were Rachel's parents, I'd sue the pants off everyone involved in this. This is absolutely bottom-of-the barrel, negative-IQ, no-judgment-involved thinking. Her father is absolutely right to say that her constitutional rights have been violated, although I'm amazed at the restraint her parents are displaying in this article. I would not have even ceded, as does her mother, that this extremely private literature should have been brought to the parents' attention.
Even if we give the teacher leeway for confiscating the journal, on the grounds that it was a non-class-related item being passed around during class, the teacher had no right to keep it and no right to read it. And then to summon the police in and expel a creative honors student for a private work of fiction? This young woman must feel like she's been raped. I would have, if a teacher took my private journal, read it, and then pressed criminal charges against me for what was in it, resulting in publicity which declared to the entire school, not to mention the world, what was in the journal.
Every time I assume that the zero-tolerance idiocies cannot get worse, they do. Next up, I assume, is that schools will move beyond regulating all thought, speech, and action within the school grounds and start prosecuting students for "crimes" committed off the grounds (in fact, since Rachel wrote the story at home, isn't that exactly what has happened here?). No kid in the public school system will be safe.
I hope Roswell High School understands that it has just made itself a national laughingstock - and that it's also just terrifed any Roswell student who has ever put pen to paper to express a politically-incorrect thought. What's next? Locker searches for angry notes? Private-journal-sniffing dogs?
Update: I missed the appearance of Rachel and her father on Hannity and Colmes tonight; if anyone saw it, let me know. They also did an interview with CNN reporter Soledad O'Brian, who asks some rather thick-headed questions, and I thought the Boims showed amazing restraint:
O'BRIEN: David, obviously you guys have been now embroiled in this controversy with the school. Can you understand the school's perspective, a teacher takes that, reads that says, "Oh, my goodness, this sounds to me like a kid who is planning on shooting up our school?"
DAVID BOIM: The school administrators live in a what-if world. So I can understand them being concerned and calling us in and having a discussion. But what -- everything that transpired beyond that is almost surreal. The fact that her teacher took the book because it might have been a distraction in class, that's great. The fact that the journal was not returned and he actually read the journal -- that's very, very disturbing to me. And she was expelled for inappropriate writings.
What is appropriate writing? What is not appropriate writing? What is an appropriate thought? What is not an appropriate thought? Where does that erosion of civil liberties and our rights as American citizens -- where does that begin and where does that end? That -- those are very troubling issues. And I made it very clear to them from the very beginning that those were my concerns.
Let me tell you, my stepfather is a patient man, but he not have been as patient as Mr. Boim was, had a reporter suggested that a school might have a point in assuming that a fictional tale of mine about a single violent act would be reasonable evidence to assume that I was "planning on shooting up our school." His answer would have been, "Are you insane? If the administrators are stupid enough to conclude that, after reading this journal which they had no business reading in the first place, and so completely incapable of understanding the difference between the constitutionally-protected act of creative writing and criminal planning, then they're too dumb to be left alone with minors, period."
Mr. Boim's response is much more elegant and polite. But I believe he makes the same point.
Posted by kswygert at October 24, 2003 04:59 PM