The Moderate Voice is reviving its Get A Life Club©.
To become a member of the TMV’s Get A Life Club© someone must be so incredibly politically correct or inane in turning a small thing into a screaming or legal crusade that they deserve special recognition for leaving us truly stunned. And we have double lifetime inductees here:
When a Bellmead father received a letter from his son’s school district saying the 4-year-old had inappropriately touched a teacher’s aide, he said he couldn’t believe what he was reading.
“When I got that letter, my world flipped,” DaMarcus Blackwell said.
The Nov. 13 letter from La Vega Independent School District stated his son, who was 4 years old at the time, was involved in “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment” after the boy hugged a teacher’s aide and “rubbed his face in the chest of (the) female employee” on Nov. 10.
The letter also stated Blackwell’s son, who Blackwell requested not be named in this story for privacy reasons, spent the day in in-school suspension (ISS) as punishment for the incident.
Blackwell has since filed a complaint with the district.
In turn, the district changed the offense to “inappropriate physical contact” and removed references of sexual contact or sexual harassment from the boy’s file, according to a subsequent letter from the district.
We don’t usually lay awake hoping that a lawyer will get some business that makes him and his client a ton of money. Not usually….
But there is another side to it:
The question of whether a touch is meant inappropriately or is an innocent gesture by a young child is not as easily answered through a checklist of factors, said David Davis, executive director of the Advocacy Center for Crime Victims & Children in Waco.
“A lot of variables come into play,” Davis said, adding he doesn’t know the details of Blackwell’s son’s incident.
Variables such as age, maturity and exposure to factors like pornography or even molestation, influence whether a touch is innocent or not, he said.
In the recent case of a La Vega Independent School District elementary student who allegedly inappropriately touched a teacher’s aide, Davis said the things to consider are not as much the gestures themselves as the behavior afterward.
“It’s a concern if a child didn’t respond to redirection,” Davis said. “I would be more concerned about a child’s response to limits set by an adult more than the touch itself.”
Interesting…but you wouldn’t have even read something like the above 10 years ago. SO:
For their apparent decision to seemingly criminalize a child’s action of showing affection to a teacher who at that age becomes a kind of parent substitute, the La Vega Independent School District and the female employee who made an issue of it are immediately inducted into TMV’s Get A Life Club©. We are quite sure they can rest assured that they have had a long lasting impact on this little child’s life that could be felt into adulthood.
PS: To Mr. Blackwell. Look for a district that won’t suspend a four year old child for giving a teacher an even energetic hug. Most districts in the United States, various countries, and any planets with life in our solar system or beyond won’t. How does TMV know? He has visited a lot of pre and elementary schools across the country in the past 16 years and has seen lots of teachers and kids interacting. And he has never EVER seen a 4 year old suspended for giving a teacher a big hug.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.