School District Fails to Protect Bullying Victim at MLK
11 year-old Dominique Reed is a bully victim. She is the target of choice for the number one bully at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. She gets taunted, pushed and punched. Her hearing aid gets taken and thrown around the playground.
Three times Reed tried to show her tormentors just how tough she was. Acting against the advice of the school, she fought back. Each time she was suspended along with the attacker.
�There�s nothing I can do,� she said. �If I tell, nothing happens, and every time I defend myself I get suspended.�
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Student’s refusal to adjust cap leads to arrest, controversy
Updated March 16, 2004: School system investigating school official and police officer actions.
Updated March 29, 2004: Students, National Action Network, march in protest of ‘racist’ Saguaro policies
Marlon Morgan is a junior at Saguaro High School. His mother is a teacher and he was nominated for Youth of the Year last year. He’s also black.
Recently, Marlon was arrested for wearing his baseball cap sideways.
Marlon was sitting in the school cafeteria when Saguaro security guards asked him to turn his hat around and he refused saying he felt singled out.
It is against school policy to wear hats sideways because it can be a sign of disrespect for authority, the police report said, but Marlon, who is Black, said that the rule is enforced selectively. According to a police report, he pointed to several White students whose hats were on sideways.
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Updated 26 March 2004: Yolo County Education Board Votes 4-0 To Allow Liston’s Return
DHS student arrested for gun in truck
According to the Davis Police Department, Adam Howard Liston came to school for two consecutive days with a 12-gauge shotgun in his pickup truck, which was parked in a school parking lot. The unloaded shotgun was in the cab of the truck and ammunition was in a locked utility box in the truck’s bed.
Liston, a senior, was arrested at 8:05 a.m. Thursday, then released later in the day from the Yolo County Jail on $25,000 bail.
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The consequences of bringing a gun to campus are severe. According to the Davis school district’s student behavior policy, when a student brings a firearm to campus, law enforcement officers must be contacted, and the student is subject to a five-day suspension and mandatory expulsion.
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Steven Sabbadini, a lawyer representing Liston, said the teenager had bought the shotgun for his 18th birthday.
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“On Wednesday, (Liston) completed his classes at noon, went home to change with the intent of taking his new shotgun to the range for target practice before going to work,”
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Sabbadini said that on Wednesday evening, Liston put the shotgun back into its original box, but inadvertently left it on the back seat of his truck instead of taking it in the house.
On Thursday morning, Sabbadini said, Liston went to the school parking lot and parked and locked his vehicle.
“This was an oversight on his part,” the attorney said. “He did not knowingly take the shotgun to the parking lot.”
Sabbadini indicated that he believes Liston did not commit a crime. While California Penal Code Section 626.9 makes it unlawful to possess a firearm within a school zone, Sabbadini maintained that a subsection of that code “states that unloaded long guns (rifles/shotguns) are not prohibited provided that they are stored and transported in accordance with state law.
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Students Censured For Wearing Pink
Six students at Ensign Middle School were pulled from their class picture because they were wearing pink shirts. Principal Edward Wong was afraid that the pink shirts meant they were affiliated with “dance crews” from a local gang. These nefarious dance crews hold all-night dance contests and parties. Maybe things have changed a lot since my school days but I just don’t associate coreographed pink dancers with violent gang activity.
The boys denied being crew members and said they wore the shirts, which students described as “Easter pink,” to stand out in the photo.
More than 400 of the 1,000 seventh- and eighth-graders at the upscale school wore pink to class the following day in support of the teens. Many said they would wear pink again Friday.
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Many Sick Students Can’t Carry Asthma Inhalers in School
According to Dr. Kim Witzmann of Children’s National Medical Center there will be 5,000 deaths this year from asthma attacks because the victim could not get to their medication in time.
Kim McFerrin was in seventh grade when she had her first asthma attack on the soccer field at her school in Northeast Salem, Ore.
“I kept sneezing and the more I kept sneezing, the harder it was getting for me to breathe and it got to the point where I couldn’t breathe at all and I knew my inhaler was across the street and on the other side of the school,” Kim recalled.
Kim’s inhaler was locked in the principal’s office, because even though the school knew about her illness, it was against school policy for her to carry an inhaler with her.
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Ringgold student expelled over slur
A white high school student was expelled by the school board in a unanimous vote. His crime was an alleged racist remark that he wanted to “line up all of the black students and kill them”. So was this zero tolerance against hate speech? Zero tolerance against threats? Zero tolerance against racism?
The board voted 8-0 to require the 15-year-old Carroll Township resident undergo a drug and alcohol assessment and a psychiatric evaluation.
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Positive Nicotine Test To Keep Student From Prom
This story played out in April of 2002 but we will be seeing more like it in the near future. President Bush’s call for increased drug testing of students makes it almost inevitable.
Take a zero tolerance policy on drug use (with nicotine included as a prohibited substance), combine it with drug screening of students involved in extracurricular activities and the result is a blatant miscarriage of justice. 18 year-old student Rob Mahon was barred from his prom for smoking cigarettes legally.
Rob Mahon, 18, did not smoke on school property and is upset that he’s being punished for an activity that is legal for someone his age.
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“It (the policy) became a problem when you’re being punished for doing something off-grounds which is legal,” [ICLU attorney Ken] Falk said. “This is as if the school said, ‘If you read a certain book at home, you’ll be punished at school.’ It’s ridiculous.”
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Strip Search Outrage
An in-school police patrol went overboard when $27 was reported stolen from a Mt.Carmel girls’ lockerroom.
Mt. Carmel’s Superintendent Richard Beierschmitt told Newswatch 16 that officers crossed the line when they demanded the students be searched. Now, one family says they’re going to file a lawsuit because their daughter’s rights were violated.
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[Kathy Dusendschine] said she got a frantic call from her daughter last week. The teen said she was forced to remove her clothes after a gym class. School officials say that was the act of two Mt. Carmel Township police officers who were patrolling the school. Apparently, there was a report that $27 was stolen from the locker room. That prompted the officers to ask a gym teacher to search the girls. When she said no, officers got a nurse to do it. The superintendent says she took the girls into a room and asked them to lift up their shirts and drop their pants and looked of the cash. The administration said they had no idea what was going on.
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2 IPS teachers are suspended for paddling
Rachelle Phifer, an Indionapolis Public School teacher, determined that corporal punishment was needed for a group of her students. She enlisted the assistance of a male teacher (Ulysses Coleman Jr.) to administer the punishment.
The six students, all 9-year-old boys, are in the same class. They received the corporal punishment Wednesday because Phifer believed they were part of a gang, according to the mother of one of the boys.
The teachers have been suspended pending an investigation by Marion County Child Protection Services.
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Zero tolerance for common sense
On Wednesday a sixth grader at Woonsocket Middle School peeled an orange during lunch. Unfortunately he did this with a knife. Even more unfortunately the knife he did it with was brought from home.
The 13-year-old was charged by police with possession of a weapon in school, which is a violation of state law. He was also suspended from school for 10 days and told that he must plead guilty during a hearing before a disciplinary panel before he will be allowed to return to his classroom.
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