Umm…
The boy not only fled school… he fled his home.
Why didn’t he go to his parents? Why, in order to avoid bullies in school is he willing to abandon his family?
Yes, there is more here than meets the eye. Look towards the family as well as the class room situation to find it.
Who exactly is foaming at the mouth as a direct result of the news in the OP? Standards, man, we gotta have some standards;)
Sorry, larger bold text is bad enough for me. 
I fucking disgust you, Polycarp? Go pray about that asshole.
Um… Polycarp? I mean, damn! The kid ran off, obviously there is something wrong, but until there is further investigation, we DON’T know that his story is true. We shouldn’t immediately jump down the throats of the school administration until we have independant verification that there was something going on in school that they should have handled. It’s just as possible that he’s got family problems and made up the bullying to avoid getting mom and dad in trouble.
When all your evidence is the story of an 11 year old boy in trouble, you really can’t jump to conclusions.
Pfft. Ain’t nobody wished a goat-felching on anyone yet:)
Meanwhile, Cheesesteak, thanks for the attempt at reassurance, but when “all” we have is an 11-year-old boy, whose previous driving experience was a few times with the family tractor and backing out of the driveway, driving 200 miles away from home, I for one think that isn’t all that small and all. YMMV:)
True, it is odd that the child ran from his home as well.
It could be something to get more attention, or maybe he felt/knew that things wouldn’t be resolved by the people in his home.
Maybe he was ignored or they were thinking along the same lines as ignore it and it will go away.
I am in a way glad that the child ran if had no other way, as opposed to hurting himself or hurting others. Both are possibilities.
This way he can get help and maybe get something resolved. Either way if it is attention getting or a real issue.
I do realise by running the way he did he could have hurt himself of other in the process as well, but thankfully he didn’t. He ran in a way that drew attention, instead of silently walking away fairly unnoticed.
Maybe he was sick and tired of all the"just avoid him", the “turn the other cheek” and “be more understanding” load of crap that is usually dumped in the victim’s lap. Maybe he was tired of nobody believing him because he is just 11. Maybe his old man was an asshole and was berating him for losing fights. Maybe he was sick and tired of telling the school about it and being ignored, and then being beat up for telling them. Been there, done that, got the T shirt. There are a lot of maybes.
I was in that situation, getting into trouble for fighting and for not fighting and for losing fights - a no win situation, while the bullies got away clean. I tell you all something… I learned to be mean, to be never give in, and to fight as dirty as I could, to draw blood.
I caught one of these same bullies beating up my little sister. Want to know what I did? After years of putting up with people fucking with me and now seeing this I went ballistic. I kicked him in the nuts and when he doubled up I grabbed both ears and kneed him in the face over and over, and did my best to throw him in front of an oncoming car. I meant to kill him and I almost did it. Anyone who thinks bullying is no big deal, or can be handled by ignoring it is a fucking moron.
Hold on there, pard. If the kid was being bullyed (sp?) and felt the need to escape, that IS a terrible thing.
But the fact that the kid took off in a car, and says it was because of “X” doesn’t really *prove * it was because of “X”. You know what I’m saying? It could possibly be a joyride or a runaway and a clever tale to escape consequences. I’m not saying that is what happened. But it’s possible.
I fled home several times before I was 13, for the adventure. I didn’t get as far as this kid. Probably because I didn’t know how to hot wire a car.
An honest question. If no one would break the time honored code of conduct rule, how is the administrator supposed to know?
Really. I’m asking. No one tells on the bully. No teachers *SEE * the bully doing his thing (they’re too smart for that). How are the powers that be to know?
If it is always the same one who comes in from recess with a bloody nose or a black eye, that’s a sign. If it’s always the same one being pushed or teased by the same bigger kid, that’s a sign. If it’s always the same one who gets caught fighting 2 or more people at a time, that’s a sign. If it’s always the bigger one who slinks away just as you get there but there has obviously been a fight, that’s a sign. All you have to do is pay attention. I eventually learned how to deal with bullies on my own. They learned to leave me alone. But in the process, I was becoming worse than they were. Why? Because nobody chose to listen or see what was going on. You can’t tell me a grade schooler is smarter than an adult, the adults were just too lazy to bother watching.
Where I went to school, the bullying was done away from teachers eyes. They seem to have a sixth sense about that. Most often, it was done off school grounds anyway. And bullys rarely hit the face. It was almost always the painful but invisible gut punch.
I dunno. Maybe things have changed.
It was a combination of things when I went to school. Yes, the bullies tried to suppress stuff, but the teachers in my grade purposefully would place themselves where they would not be able to see the other kids. My 5th grade homeroom teacher would eat her lunch with her back to the window. The window looked out on the recess area where I got pummeled on much more than one occasion.
She couldn’t separate herself from all of it. The bullies were confident enough sometimes to do stuff right in front of her because they knew, and she knew, that they controlled the class. She did fuckall to stop them, and this was not a pattern confined to 5th grade. In high school, for example, two housemasters were in PLAIN VIEW of something that was done to me and I got sent to bed because I was being “loud.” Why was I being loud? You get three people giving you shit and see how quiet you are;)
Both of them saw. I got punished.
Another time (and this is a minor incident, rest assured, just meant to convey how truly apathetic some teachers are) a kid hid my baseball glove in a tree. He claimed he saw it jump up in the tree. Told my coach as much. The coach was also one of my housemasters (not one of those in the above example) and one of the housemasters of this kid.
Guess who got to retrieve the glove.
Bullies will hide stuff, to be sure, but when they figure out they can get away with something they will do it until they figure it isn’t worth it. If they aren’t deterred, it will just get worse. That’s part of what I am trying to stop with my current work with these kids and an integral part of why I’m training to be a teacher.
[/hijack]
I have decided to home school my son next year, for these reasons.
Schools are almost clueless and do not care.
While I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, I was given exactly the same punishment for the two times I participated in a fight. The first time, I stood there and ended up with a broken nose. The second, I hit someone over the head with a T-square. This did little to further my faith in the general disciplinary setup at public high schools.
So much for being innocent until proven guilty.
The boy alleges he was bullied. The alleged bullies have rights, too. They, if they exist, and if they are named, have constitutional rights. Thanks for trying and convicting them based solely on the outlandishness of the boy’s stunt as ‘proof’ that there were indeed bullies.
Y’all stop projecting the horrors of your own experiences onto this lad without proof that his allegation is actually true. You are overreacting, and you intellectually know it. Now, let your brains kindly inform your guts to knock it off until more real information and actual evidence is found.
I’m going to back off, apologize to Carnal for lashing out at him in particular, and say this much:
Abuse of children happens – by bullies, by parents, by bunches of people.
IMO it’s far more common than the occasional appearance of stories about it would suggest.
Much of it’s physical, some sexual, some “merely” verbal and emotional, not harming the child’s body but chipping away at his spirit.
I don’t have a clue what actually provoked the boy’s stunt here – but given the information in the story: (a) he claims it was to escape bullying; (b) he’s described in terms that make me think he’s not just covering for a joyride (which would be pretty odd for that age anyway).
SO: get the answers. We (corporately, not any one of us or the SDMB) need to prevent abusive situations of whatever form, including bullying. Find out what’s behind this situation, and correct it, whatever it is.
Oh, and Moriah? Yeah, the alleged bullies have constitutional rights. Those rights don’t include the right to bully, or to go scott free after perpetrating what the kid alleges caused him to take off like that. I haven’t tried or convicted Jason H. or Sammy R. for the crime – I’ve merely said that the school district needs to be much more vigilant about bullying, and stop those who do. I think I can say that I’m opposed to violent rape in general without being accused of trying to try and convict someone accused of it and now standing trial. Same thing applies to the bullying here.
No you didn’t.
You tried to lambast the Associate Supt for apparently not knowing in advance about the bullying accusation. You lambasted her for saying "“But we’re taking the concern very seriously,” Associate Superintendent Patty Schumacher said. “We don’t want a student to ever feel pushed into a corner or want to just take off.”
You’ve insinuated, from one line in a CNN story, that (1) bullying occured to the boy, that (2) said bullying was NOT a single episode, (3) that teachers or administrators are at fault for not knowing that said bullying happened to the 11 year old boy.
Other folks chimed in with past experiences or guesses about whether the teachers knew something.
However, as of yet I have yet to see ANYTHING in the one line of that CNN story that leads a reasonable person to rip a new asshole for Ms. Schumacher.
I’m with beagledave on this one. In the absence of any other information, the responses of Ms. Schumacher struck me as being completely appropriate. It sounded as if she was truly concerned about the situation, and was determined to find out what was going on, and to make sure that it didn’t happen again. I saw no justification for criticizing her in any way, shape, or form.
If it transpires that the kid was, in fact, being routinely bullied in school, then school officials certainly deserve some criticism (though it would still be pretty tough to pin the blame on an associate superintendent, who I don’t imagine would be watching over the playground). But none of us knows whether that was happening or not.
I’m curious, Polycarp - what do you think she should have said?
Ah, but something is going on, and as several posts (not only mine) have said, it is easier to either deliberately ignore it, or punish the ones being bullied. That is how you get people like what I was becoming. I was literally trying to kill the kid I caught hitting my sister, and I wasn’t even out of grade school yet.
Fortunately for me, this time I had a whole school bus full of witnesses and several adult neighbors to back up my story, so it was not so easy to just deny or ignore it. 40 plus years later, I still have to keep a lid on my temper and my mouth, and it isn’t easy.
So, diregarding any theoretical dissertations about the rights of the bully, which is worse - to deal with it, or just maybe, have something really bad and permanent happen to the bully.
I’ll let you in on a secret too. Bullies do not change their ways or grow out of it. They just get worse. Just 15 years ago there was a classic bully in our apartment complex. He would hit other peoples’ children and threaten their parents. He wouldn’t fight me, precisely because I wanted him to. He did try to scare me with his dogs, but thought twice when I dared him to turn them loose. He finally moved out, and a about year after that, someone killed him - my guess is, he tried to pull his stunts on the wrong people. My instinctive reaction was “good riddance to bad rubbish”.
I was going to drop this thread but I guess I should come back to say apology accepted to Polycarp.
beagledave said more precisly what I was trying to get across. I sympathize with people being concerned about kids, and used to them generally overreacting. I’m just saying this story has pretty much no context and people are using it to voice their pet criticisms of the school system/bullies. Aren’t there stories about actual bullying to use as a starting point?
Well, I can guarantee one thing - when I went through primary and high school the bullies were sure enough of being ignored that they didn’t stop their ways just because teachers were around.
The teachers knew exactly what was going on and did nothing whatsoever to stop it. I had a boy in a year level above me bully and eventually try to sexually assault me when I was in grade 9, and only the fact that I totally snapped and tried to kill him stopped the harassment. Teachers saw it happen on several occasions and didn’t intervene.
Maybe some teachers are blind to bullying and harassment, but I can say with absolute certainty that it’s not always the case.