Randy Principles
First Grade outrage.
By Mark Steyn
Is American public education a form of child abuse? A week ago, the
Wa****ngton Post's Brigid Schulte re****ted on a student named Randy
Castro who attends school in Woodbridge, Va. Last November at recess
he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the
principal. School officials wrote up an incident re****t and then
called the police.
Randy Castro is in the First Grade. But, at the ripe old age of six,
he's been declared a *** offender by Potomac View Elementary School.
He's guilty of ***ual harassment, and the incident re****t will remain
on his record for the rest of his schooldays -- and maybe beyond. Maybe
it'll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background
checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply
for a job and at his prospective employer's computer up will pop his
***ual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he'll be able to keep it
hushed up until he's 57 and runs for governor of Virginia and suddenly
his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his
Spitzeresque ***ual pathologies are revealed. But that's what he is
now: Randy Castro, *** offender. The title of the incident re****t
spells out his crime: "***ual Touching Against Student, Offensive."
The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that
school officials are having to spend so much of their energies
grappling with the First Grade ***ual-harassment epidemic they can no
longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as
punctuation.
Randy Castro was not apprehended until he was six, so who knows how
long his reign of ***ual terror lasted? Sixteen months ago, a school
official in Texas accused a four-year-old of ***ual 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. Fortunately,
the school took decisive action and suspended the sick freak. By the
way, is that the first recorded use in the history of the English
language of the phrase "accused a four-year-old of ***ual harassment"?
Well, it won't be the last: In the state of Maryland last year, 16
kindergartners were suspended for ***ual harassment, as were three pre-
schoolers.
School officials declined to comment to the Wa****ngton Post on Master
Castro's case on the grounds of student confidentiality. However, they
did say that the decision to call the cops was "the result of a
misunderstanding." And it's not like he was Tasered or anything.
When school officials call 911 because of a "misunderstanding" with a
six-year-old, the fault is theirs: He's a kid; and they're school
officials who are supposedly trained and handsomely remunerated to
know how to deal with children. Incidentally, the phrase "school
officials" isn't quite as rare as "37-year-old teacher's aide accuses
four-year old of ***ual harassment" but it would still ring foreign to
your average old-school schoolmarm in a one-room schoolhouse. Back
then schools had schoolchildren and schoolteachers and that was pretty
much it. But now grade schools are full of "officials," just like the
Department of Homeland Security.
So who does get a little breast and butt action in American schools
these days? Obviously not your four-year-old gropers and six-year-old
predators: The system's doing an admirable job of cracking down on
those perverts. No, if you want to get up close and personal with body
parts you've got to be a "school official." The U.S. Court of Appeals
for the 9th Circuit recently heard oral arguments in the case of
Savana Redding. Back in 2003, Savana was an Eighth Grader at Safford
Middle School in Safford, Arizona, when the vice principal, Kerry
Wilson, "acting on a tip," discovered a fellow student to have a
handful of ibuprofen tablets in her pocket. The other girl said she
got them from Savana, who denied it. She had no tablets in her own
pockets or in her backpack. Vice Principal Wilson, whose mind works in
interesting ways, then decided that Savana might be hiding the
ibuprofen in her cleavage or her crotch. So, without contacting the
girl's parents, he ordered a school official to strip-search Savana.
She was obliged to expose her breasts and "her pelvic area." If Vice
Principal Wilson were a four-year old pre-schooler who'd been involved
in a stunt like that, he'd now be a registered *** offender for life.
But fortunately he's a "school official" so if he decides to apply
search techniques associated with international narcotics traffic he
pretty much has a free hand to do so. After all, ibuprofen is serious
stuff. As Reason's Jacob Sullum put it, "It's a good thing the school
took swift action, before anyone got unauthorized relief from
menstrual cramps."
The policies of these "school officials" are dignified by the name of
"zero tolerance." "Zero sanity" would be a more accurate description.
One day we'll look back at this period of government-instituted
madness and wonder why those entrusted with the care of minors (or, to
be more accurate, those who enjoy a de facto state monopoly over the
care of minors) were unable to do what teachers in civilized societies
have been able to do throughout human history -- exercise individual
human judgment. This week Michelle Obama called for Americans to pony
up even more dough for their public school system. The United States
already spends more per student than any other developed nation except
Switzerland, and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. By
any reasonable measure, at least a third of the cash dumped into
American schools is entirely wasted. And, if we simply ****pped every
youngster to boarding school in the Alps instead, the kindergartners
might have a s****ting chance of making it to Second Grade before being
designated as ***ual abusers.
But I don't expect Michelle Obama to see it like that. Last week, an
Obama delegate was revealed to have told her next door neighbor's kids
to come down from the tree and quit playing "like monkeys."
Unfortunately for her, they were African American, so she was
"ticketed" for racist speech by the Carpentersville police, and, after
issuing the usual solemn statements deploring such decisive remarks,
Senator Obama removed the delegate from his campaign, had her encased
in a cement overcoat and lowered into the Chicago River. He, too,
operates a "zero tolerance" policy. Amid the debris of human lives
caught up in these idiocies, you can also find the ruins of an
indispensable element of civilized society: a sense of pro****tion.
(c) 2008 Mark Steyn
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