What are they smoking?

I’ve written a few posts over the last month about the extremes to which some parents and school officials will go to “protect the children”. Often such incidents provide a laugh or two, like the school in Britain that covered the faces of children with smiley faces in their on-line newsletter. The objective, apparently, was to protect the children from on-line predators. The easier way, of course, was not to publish the photos in the first place.

But an article published in the Washington Post earlier this month contained no element of humour at all. Post reporter Brigid Schulte described an incident in which a male student slapped a female classmate on the butt during recess. He was promptly hauled before the principal who, just as promptly, called the police.

The title on the incident report prepared by school officials said, “Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive”. Uh-huh. Guilty of sexual harassment. And the incident report will stay on his record for his remaining school days and maybe beyond.

The Potomac View Elementary School student was a six year old first grader. The school officials were, allegedly, adults.

Although it’s unlikely the six year old was capable of forming any criminal intent, he has been branded as a sex offender by these highly trained child care professionals. Calling 911, school officials claimed later, was simply the result of a “misunderstanding”. Uh-huh.

Schulte, in the same article, reports on a case that occurred in Texas a year or so ago. Apparently, a school official in Texas accused a 4-year-old of sexual harassment after the boy was observed pressing his face into the breasts of a teacher's aide when he hugged her before boarding the school bus.

One must assume the teacher’s aide was bending down to hug him back if his face was pressing into her breasts; four year olds aren’t usually all that tall. Fortunately, the school official who observed the incident took positive action and had the little pervert suspended.

Isolated incidents? Overly zealous school officials? Not according to Schulte. She believes the real culprit is the ever increasing number of “zero tolerance” policies cropping up across the country.

She notes in her article that, last year in the state of Maryland alone, 16 kindergartners and three preschoolers were suspended for sexual harassment. Nineteen kids aged six and under branded as sexual offenders before they graduated from first grade.

School officials (what ever in hell they are) and teachers are supposed to be trained to deal with children. Even without training, the application of a little old-fashioned common sense should have resolved any difficulties that might have arisen.

Zero tolerance policies in schools are one thing, but suspending four year olds for sexual harassment is lunacy.