Another Reason for Home Schooling.

Girl is harassed by bullies. Girl complains to school admin. Bullies are questioned. Girl is expelled.

Does anyone truly remember how bad bullying can be? I do. As much as it pains me to say it, I can understand when kids react violently to bullies. As wrong as it might be, I can understand what drove the Columbine killers.

Is that wrong? Probably. But every person reaches a point where they break. As you grow older, that point is farther and farther away. But young kids haven't reached that level yet. They're still close to the breaking point.

In my highschool, I saw kids abused just about every way possible. I certainly wasn't the biggest kid there, so I got my share of crap. I learned that if I went psycho at the first hint of provocation, I could avoid any other physical punishment. People tend to remember you when you leap up, grab a handful of shirt and start screaming directly into a person's face that you'll bite their fucking noses off. They pushed, and I pushed back harder. They came at me, and I cut them off at the knees. I played dirty, and it mostly kept me out of anything worse than verbal abuse. I didn't get into one single fight in highschool, because the bullies knew that fighting me meant that even if they won, they were going to be wearing several reminders from me on their face. They didn't want that, they wanted easy targets.

But that didn't protect me from their verbal abuse. And it didn't protect anyone else in the school. What do you do when a group of bullies gang up on a friend of yours and shatter his eye socket?

What do you do when five guys pound the shit out of someone and all you can do is stand there helplessly?

I've seen kids seriously injured by high school bullies. I've seen kids slammed against lockers, kicked until they couldn't stand up. I've heard some of the worst filth come out of their mouths, until listening to drill sergeants was a day in the park. Listening to a grown man call you a worthless maggot doesn't compare to some asshole behind you in math class telling you how he was going to rape your mother with a broom handle.

And when I complained? Nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. I found out real quick that the only course of action was your own. The school wasn't going to help you. Oh, maybe if you were physically injured, they'd get suspended for a time, but they always came back. The guy who shattered my friend's eyesocket was gone for two weeks.

TWO. WEEKS.

So this girl complains about bullying, and gets expelled when the bullies lie about her? I'm not surprised. You take a thousand (or in my school, two thousand) kids, place them in close proximity, and give them minor supervision for eight hours, and the results are not pretty. This girl is better off out of that school.

But it doesn't make the school right. And it certainly doesn't address the problem.

Just another reason to flush the current public school system down the drain. There are too many flaws in it to fix. Destroy, and then rebuild it.

Hat tip to the Rott