Lawyer Calls Young Boy's Sexual Harassment Suspension 'Absurd'
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
March 10, 2004
(AgapePress) - A civil liberties attorney says a California school district went way overboard when it suspended a 10-year-old student for making a wisecrack about a female classmate's chest.The fifth-grader at Theodore Judah Elementary school in Sacramento made the remark to a male friend, who then ran over and repeated it to the girl. According to an account in the Sacramento Bee, the incident occurred four days after the controversial Super Bowl halftime performance and a week after the boy had attended a sex education class.
Principal Marilee Bellotti claims the boy's crude comment violated the district's sexual harassment policy. The boy was required to stay home the next day, and in the wake of the suspension, the principal has ordered that a 17-minute video called, "Respecting Each Other: Sexual Harassment Prevention," be shown to several classes.
But some critics of the school official's reaction to the incident say that it was both extreme and ineffective, and that the district should rethink a "zero-tolerance" policy that treats a 10-year-old the same as it would treat a high school senior. And the boy's parents are particularly upset that, rather than getting all the children involved together and allowing their son an opportunity to apologize, he has been punished, labeled, and stigmatized as a sexual harasser.
Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead considers the boy's suspension absurd and says what the school district has is not a zero-tolerance policy but a "zero common sense" policy. "In my day, when I went to school, these kinds of things were handled by a teacher talking to you briefly, and you went back into your classroom and never missed any school over these things," he says.
However, in the current climate of many U.S. public schools, Whitehead says educators often fail to distinguish between punishment and discipline. "In the schools, children need to be disciplined and not punished," he contends. "You punish people in reform schools. What they're doing to the children now is, if they make one mistake -- and they're often silly mistakes -- children are automatically thrown out of school."
And Whitehead believes the Sacramento incident is part of a dangerous plan being implemented through America's public school system -- an attempt to bring children under the total control of the state and its authorities. "If you're going to treat children like this," he says, "this is the way they were treated in the old Soviet Union. This is the way they're treated, in many ways, in Communist China right now."
Whitehead says what is happening in Sacramento and in many other public schools in America resembles that same kind of totalitarianism. "It's the state taking utter control," he says. "It's political correctness gone crazily amok across our country -- a very dangerous trend."
The head of Rutherford Institute says the general population of the U.S. is basically falling in line with this totalitarian push, with the workplace, the public square, and even the public schools being regimented by so many laws and so many rules that the government is now in nearly every nook and cranny of Americans' lives.
