Zero Tolerance Insanity Tackles High School Football Player
An Ohio football player became the latest victim of zero tolerance bullying policies, for writing poetry for a class assignment mourning the results of a recent game.
On Friday, at Rittman High School just outside of Akron, Ohio, junior Nick Andre’s composition class assignment was to write a poem about something that makes him mad.
Andre, who plays for Rittman’s 1-7 football team, chose to vent his anger about the team’s disappointing season, reports Cleveland Fox affiliate WJW.
“I got told to write a poem and I did,” the defensive end explained.
Here’s a snippet of the poem, entitled “Stupid”:
Losing season
Favoritism
Nonstop passes from best friend to best friend
Continuously doing what doesn’t workAnother few lines go:
Dropped passes but yet still the superstar
Yeah, right
Where’s my scholarship?
I can drop passesAndre said he had to read his lament in class, which he did.
Next, he ended up suspended for four days and kicked off the football team for the remainder of the season.
Rittman High’s principal — Nick Evans, according to the school district website — charged that Andre, 16, “wrote a mean and disrespectful poem about another student and our athletic director/head coach.” He characterized the assigned poem as “hazing, harassment.”
Julie Andre, Nick’s mother, met with the principal on Monday.
“All he could refer to was bullying,” she told WJW. “This poem was bullying. And my comment was, ‘Why would the teacher entertain this assignment, you know, because you don’t know what you may get from teenage kids. So, to me, I couldn’t understand bullying.”
The angry mother declined to sign her son’s letter of suspension.
Principal suspends football player, calls him a bully for POEM about his own losing team (The Daily Caller)
Comments
There used to be an honor code in high school. I can’t imagine writing the above poem about my team I was a part of and not expecting some type of consequence for writing it. It was childish and immature for him to write this(Imagine doing this in a company newsletter, etc about one’s boss…)
I personally believe his suspension from the team was valid. His suspension from school for bullying is , in a word, BS. There is no bullying, it is whining and sour grapes.
Bullying happens when fear is caused in the person it is directed towards. I highly doubt the superstar player is in fear of being physically assaulted, or his feelings are going to be hurt on a daily basis from the whiners poem.
Both could have been taught how to properly handle their respective emotions regarding this episode. But no, we have “educators” who themselves have no self esteem and simply fall back on the bullying cop out to punish someone for a misdeed. I swear, almost every school administrator I’ve met in the last twenty years couldn’t hold their own in a pillow fight without crying and begging for help.
And then filing suit claiming, bullying.
A tempest in a teapot. The poet should not have been disciplined at all, unless it were for writing a lousy poem. This is just an indication of the wretched state of our culture.