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Bullying is bad, but this whole thing is selective outrage. If someone was bullied there for any other trait, would any authorities have cared about it? Let alone open a Federal investigation?
On one hand, probably not. The ability of school administrations to ignore bullying, or worse to come down like a pile of bricks only on students who defend themselves, is pretty legendary. I've written before about a school district that managed to have its employees walk by some of the most severe crimes: overlooking some thrown food or an implausibly-friendly 'joke' is a lot more minimal than that and certainly happens thousands of times a day across a country the size of the United States.
((I don't think any of the behavior here requires or even benefits from a federal investigation, instead of just telling the offending students to knock it off and, for repeat offenders, something like a detention or separated lunch sessions.))
On the other hand, I've spent six hours in the last month dealing with the fallout of a student making fun of what he perceived or joked about perceiving as (heterosexual, if it matters) flirting between two students. Part of the reason it took six hours to deal with the fallout is that the organization didn't spend fifteen minutes two weeks earlier to recognize that same complaint had shown up in three different contexts and put a stop to it then, but a bigger part is that I didn't want to have three students lose some important opportunities for learning. And that stuff then was far more marginal (I wouldn't categorize it as bullying at all, but if you had to it's definitely closer to norm enforcement than a lot of the described stuff here). And unlike the teachers in question here, making sure students have a conducive learning environment isn't my literal full-time job.
So while I absolutely agree that this shouldn't require a federal investigation, I absolutely would care about it, and would expect other adults in a position of authority or trust to at least consider the situation once brought to their attention. I'm not going to expect or even ask for heroic efforts from every teacher on the planet, and it's not hard to imagine a teacher or school administrator that didn't think any of this was worth the paper it was written on.
((I don't agree, and to no small extent I think this organizational willingness to accept disruption and student-student conflicts is one of many small reasons that some of the worst schools manage to be so incredibly bad, along with having negative effects for normal students at normal schools, but I could be persuaded that it's better than the alternatives. And there's nothing in the Duane Morris report suggesting the discipline problems in this school were outside of the typical range.))
But this teacher did decide that it was something he Cared About, enough to file with the feds and involve the ACLU. Just not enough to do anything in the meantime.
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Would you care? If yes, why don't you make it a Federal issue?
It's not up to me what gets made into a federal issue. That's up to the feds.
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