Too much reality for a Tuesday night.

"9 teenagers are charged after classmate's suicide."

I don't know if the link will be free forever, but here it is.

I feel terribly, terribly sad by this.  How do you prevent something like this?  What anti-bullying policy could the school, could the state have put in place that would have caused the students to act differently?  The DA said, “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome.”  What actions should they have taken?  What inappropriate actions did they take?

More to the point, what do I do when this happens at my school?  We were really dangerously close to something like this for a few weeks.  (The fact that it was only for a few weeks belies this statement, as the event in Massachusetts happened for most of a year.  But it was a pretty tense few weeks.)

I have never been especially in favor of courts getting involved with school bullying incidents.  It would be a tough thing to regulate, and I don't believe in "teacher as police officer."  More to the point, I guess I don't believe in "police officer as teacher."


I don't know that I believe in it now.  This is a precedent, to be sure.  I'm going to try and keep track of this.