A student refuses to write a letter to Marines as demanded by his teacher. Angered by the assignment, he says either that he wishes “American soldiers — and indeed all Americans – would die” (his teacher’s recollection) or that the Marines “might as well die, as much as I care.” Either way, not pretty, but teenagers are known to say some outrageous things as they try to sort out their political views. And in this case, the kid’s not even a teenager, but an 11-year old with a “foreign sounding name.”
So what was the consequence? The kid was suspended and sheriffs showed up at his home — a month later — to interrogate his mother for two hours.
They asked how she felt about 9/11 and the military. They asked whether she knows any foreigners who have trouble with American policy. They mentioned a German friend who had been staying with the family and asked whether the friend sympathized with the Taliban. They also inquired whether she might be teaching her children “anti-American values,” she said.
…[The mother], a U.S. citizen, and her husband, an Israeli citizen who manages a Leesburg moving company, say the investigators’ visit and the school’s response were a paranoid overreaction in a charged post-9/11 environment. But law enforcement officials say the terrorist attacks and the Columbine school shootings require them to consider whether children who make threats might post a danger to their classmates. The case illustrates the balancing act that schools and law enforcement must find between the free speech of minors and community safety.
…His parents said the boy’s words were those of a confused adolescent, whose views of the world are still being formed. They believe that authorities were called partly because he has a foreign-sounding name and accented English from years of living abroad. The family lived in India, Europe and Israel before moving to the United States in 2000.
The Washington Post editorialized.
Did it really make sense to send law enforcement officers to interrogate his parents, especially if the questioning had a political tone? It is true, as Loudoun Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson suggested, that the county needs to take threats of violence in the schools seriously; if not, he told The Post’s Rosalind S. Helderman, “something tragic [could] happen down the road that we could have prevented.” But so far as is known, Yishai [the boy] made no credible threat of violence directed at teachers or students. Although Yishai’s mother acknowledges that he has been a rambunctious student, no previous incident at school was grave enough to result in serious disciplinary action or even a letter in Yishai’s file. Moreover, if school officials or the sheriff’s office regarded Yishai as a genuine threat to public safety at Belmont Ridge, why did nearly a month pass between his outburst and the investigators’ visit to his home?
Perhaps the idea was to scare Yishai straight or to impress on him the indecency of his views. If so, there were probably better ways to deliver the message, starting with the teachers, guidance counselors, principal and other administrators at his school. Let the deployment of sheriff’s deputies to a schoolboy’s home be a last resort in the event of a specific, well-founded threat of violence.
One would certainly hope that schools use this type of likely immature reaction to teach a lesson.
Yishai said he has learned that it is not worth challenging authority. “At the end of the day, you lose,” he said, adding: “All of these freedoms and things they’re supposed to uphold, they bash them.”
Not the lesson I’d hoped for.