A high school football player in Ohio was suspended for four days and removed from the team for a poem that school administrators deemed was “harassment,” “hazing,” and “bullying.”
Nick Andre, a junior defensive end at Rittman High School, was reportedly given an assignment in composition class to write a “write a poem about something that makes him angry.”
He wrote about his 1-7 football team and read the poem in class. According to Fox 8 Cleveland:
When the administration at Rittman High learned about the content, the principal concluded that Andre, “Wrote a mean and disrespectful poem about another student and our athletic director/head coach.” The principal classified the poem as “hazing, harassment.”
Andre told the station, “Who am I harassing or hazing? I mean I didn’t state any names.”
His mother, Julie, “refused to sign the suspension letter” during a meeting with the principal and said, “All he could refer to was bullying. This poem was bullying, and my comment was, ‘why would the teacher entertain this assignment because you know, you don’t know what you may get from teenage kids, so to me, I couldn’t understand bullying.”
UPDATE: Fox Sports Ohio has posted the poem:
Losing season,
Favoritism,
Non stop passes from best friend to best friend,
Continuously doing what doesn’t work,
The inability to separate being a father and a coach,
Dropped passes,
But yet still the “super star”,
Yeah right.
Where’s my scholarship?
I can drop passes,
Run backwards,
Miss tackles,
And be afraid to take a hit.
That’s top of the line Div. 1 material right there.
If that’s what they wanted,
They definitely got it.
This whole town will be glad when he’s gone.
For anyone who doesn’t understand what I’m saying,
AKRON’S SCREWED!
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