Has anyone ever had to cope with a bully at school? How about three or four bullies, at the same time? Lets build on this; has anyone ever had a disability, such as blindness, hearing impairment, or autism, and had to cope with violent bullies? And then, when the incident was over, been blamed for the whole thing by the principal, and had him phone home to tell your parents that YOU started the fight, and that he was giving you detention, while the bullies who beat you up sneered? This is exactly what happened, shortly after I moved to Northeast Kansas, to an autistic child of whom I have legal guardianship. He was in sixth grade, and some eighth grade boys thought it would be amusing to drag him into a shower stall in the boys locker room and smash his head into the wall and fixtures. My child had no defense but to bite one of the bullies. After the bully session was stopped, my child was too frightened to say a word; he was literally quiet, after the manner of children with autism, and the bullies (whose parents are friends with the principal) glibly lied about the incident.
When I got the phone call from the principal, school had just ended. My daughter walked in the door just in time to understand the gist of the conversation I was having with the principal. Basically, he told me that my child had bitten another student. He did not say a word about the locker room, or the fact that there were three older, bigger children beating on him, he just said that my child was in trouble for biting someone. When I got off the phone, my daughter explained to me that those three boys had just finished bragging to her about how cool it was that they got away with beating up a sixth grader and got away with lying about it. I was so angry as I walked to the school that I couldn't even see straight. Apparently, this principal's method of operation when dealing with bullying had always been to blame the victim. And in an autistic child, he thought he had the perfect victim; he just hadn't counted on an honest child, not from Kansas, coming forward with the truth. Ha!
The next morning, when Mr. Principal continued to pompously blame the victim, he was educated about the
Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, with which he was NOT familiar. He still wanted to give detention to the victim. I asked him how badly he wanted to hear from a civil rights attorney, and how much media coverage he desired. He backed down from his stance of punishing the victim, but I have never been able to like or respect this man, and have never encouraged my children to truly respect him, outside of the cursory respect one must give the administrator of a school. In a recent conversation with him, he told me that he pushes Christianity on the children as much as he can legally get away with it, because it's "his job" to teach the children morals! Now I know where the above described bullies learned THEIR morals! But it certainly is not the principal's job to teach morals to MY children! It seems rather, that in my Pagan home, my children have learned much better morals than the children whose morals came from the principal of this school. But.....ever moving forward, all of my children know about this incident, and that their school administrator LIED to me about a child who was not able to defend himself. LIED; and in doing so, sent a message to the bullies that it is okay, not only with the school system to pick violently on disabled children, but okay with "Jesus".
