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Man, I can't get over the fact that The Department of
JusticeEducation is investigating middle school bullying. Like, it's middle school dude. What did you expect? I'm sure if you put everything that happened to me in middle school into an adversarial legal brief it would look pretty bad too.Let me explain the problem: Every single child in the public school system has to learn every single social rule at some point. Some will learn simply by being told, but not every rule is or could be expressed in words. Some will learn from the mistakes of their classmates. Some further will have to make the mistakes themselves. A number of these mistakes are, or must result in, bullying. Middle school is when puberty starts, and thus is where many of the most salacious rules must be learned -- learned the hard way if necessary. You can't take the bullying out of middle school and have it still be middle school.
Was anyone killed or maimed? I've known people that went to schools where bodies were being hauled out once or twice a year. Perhaps that is a bit high of a price to put on social gracefulness, but there might be a point in some of it. I've heard stories of people who had their classmates attempt to light them on fire when they were seventh-graders because they were gay in Texas in the 70s; I don't know how the attempt turned out.
The kicker: his teacher egged them on.
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You're being overly charitable to middle-schoolers if you think most of bullying is that "they didn't know better". They know better well enough, they simply don't care.
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Right, but nobody would care, because you're not a member of an actually-protected class. It's who/whom all the way down. Heterosexual boy gets beaten up, threatened, called a retard or faggot or whatever, that's just a day ending in 'y'. Same thing happens to a 'trans' student, it's literally a Federal case.
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As far as I can tell, the DoJ isn't involved; the complaints here were filed with the Office for Civil Rights under the Department of Education (officially its own cabinet-level org, for whatever anyone treats it like that). But they agree that it was too small beans for them, too, and the original complaint detailing just the middle-school harassment was closed in September of last year.
The four new complaints at the OCR, at least some of which were filed with the ACLU-PA, are about alleged retaliation against Burgess, alleged retaliation against students who protested Burgess's suspension, allegedly discriminatory naming and pronoun and class assignment policies, and failure by the school administration to respond to the bullying allegations.
I agree that some students will only learn the hard way (and sometimes not even that). I do not think the appropriate response for these alleged bullying behaviors involve removing the students from the environment, and severe punishments shouldn't (and probably can't) be brought. The galling thing here is that a teacher that believed the behaviors here were severe enough to justify an initial OCR complaint, but did not act in a way conducive to actually getting any lesson, at the expense of the targeted student that confided with him. Even something as simple as sitting the kid down and telling them to cut it out, cause that's the sorta thing that will get them in deep trouble in most office jobs, wasn't possible when the only teacher with the kid's name was sitting on it.
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