The Heritage Foundation relates the amazing story of a 15-year-old special-needs student in Pennsylvania who couldn’t stand the relentless abuse he was subjected to by his fellow students, so he recorded their taunts on an iPad, hoping this documentary evidence would finally compel the school administrators to take action.
And leap into action they did… against the bullied student. They kicked him out of his math class, brought a police lieutenant into the school to interrogate the young man, threatened him with felony wiretapping charges, and actually got him convicted of disorderly conduct. His family is currently appealing the ruling. As far as I can tell from this report, none of the actual bullies was inconvenienced at all, but their victim and his family get to enjoy the effort and expense of navigating through the court system. Naturally, the school doesn’t feel like commenting on any of this.
It sounds crazy, but it’s really quite easy to understand: the educational establishment is terrified of students recording what goes on in classrooms. In this case, the bullies were shouting vile curses at the special-needs student and pretending to club him in the head with a book, and the teacher doesn’t seem to have done much about it. Quite a few embarrassing recordings have made their way out of classrooms in recent years… and we can’t have any more of that.
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