The 5 Most Ridiculous Reasons Students Have Been Expelled
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They say knowledge is power, and it's true -- knowing the best way to dropkick a dude from a tree or balcony can be a pretty powerful piece of information. A good education can open your mind to limitless possibilities and help you reach your true potential, while so many others who get poor educations are relegated to writing Steven Seagal films or trying to prove that dinosaur fossils are less than 5,000 years old.
Knowing how important an education is, you'd think as a society we'd hold schools to a certain standard. We'd only allow them to teach the most up-to-date science and use the best techniques taught by the best people, who are skilled not just in their fields but in engaging students and assisting the learning process, so that, as a society, each new generation can excel beyond the previous and we grow as a people. And everyone, everywhere, should be entitled to that quality education, and only under the most extreme circumstances should it ever be denied or taken away from a student. Man, that sounds sexy. Instead we get schools wasting time and resources on kicking kids out for this dumbfuckery.
Rape
Seeing the title of this entry you may find yourself thinking, "Rape? Someone was expelled for rape? Of course, that makes sense," and your finger is already itching to write me a scathing comment down below for my thoughtless inclusion of this in an article. So to allay your fears, I will tell you this entry is about a girl who got expelled for being raped. Grab a drink and try to wrap your head around that.
Back in 2009, a 7th grade special education student was raped not once but twice by a fellow student. The staff, including the principal and a counselor, not only did not believe the girl, they made her write a letter of apology to the boy she accused and hand deliver it to him.
The girl, whose file indicates she's extremely averse to confrontation and would forgo even her own needs to please others, was questioned again and again by officials, who told her she was a liar until she finally recanted the story. She was then expelled for a whole year. And when she came back, she was raped again. Doctors examined her and, indeed, there was evidence she had been assaulted, including DNA evidence that makes it pretty unlikely to be a made-up story, so the school suspended her for disrespectful conduct and engaging in public displays of affection, which is the cool new way shitheads refer to rape, apparently. This being a 12-year-old girl in special ed classes known to do whatever other people want to make them happy. Feeling queasy yet?
The girl's family sued the school and almost a year later the case was settled. The school is reported to have paid the girl and her family about $185,000, which is just about the exact amount of money a scumbag will pay someone for being a scumbag if they can get a court to agree they don't have to legally admit they're a scumbag. Worth noting is that, in the school's response to the lawsuit, they claimed the charges were baseless and the girl herself was at fault for failing to take reasonable means to protect herself. That feeling you had when you read that of being slapped in the face was just the metaphysical weight of the balls some lawyer must have had to write that down in legal papers crushing your psyche.
For Being Bullied
Bullying is a huge problem today, not just in schools but pretty much everywhere in life. In the Cracked offices you can't pass the water cooler without paying Adam Brown $5. If you refuse, he punches your dick. People ask why he doesn't get fired, and the official reason is because if he gets fired, everyone gets punched in the dick.
For kids, who are having to learn how to deal with bullying in ways a lot of adults never had to experience -- online and off -- it's an epic clusterfuck that too often has an unfortunate ending. So naturally schools are on top of this, right? Eh, not so much.
I got my master's from an unaccredited school in North Korea. I literally know nothing.
Richard Crane, a high school sophomore, had been bullied for years and kept a record of the various threatening messages he'd received on Twitter and in text messages. He'd also had his ass kicked numerous times, and the bullying was so bad he was suffering post traumatic stress and panic attacks. If kids in school can put you in the same position as dudes who have gone halfway around the world and had strangers trying to blow them up on a daily basis, something is seriously wrong. So what happened? Richard finally confronted the bullies to try to make them stop. So the school expelled him. Because fuck you for not being beaten into submission yet.
Richard's mother has filed three civil rights complaints with the Department of Education, and Richard has been hospitalized and missed tons of school as a result. Assuming none of that is made up, it seems kind of like Richard is getting destroyed on a semi-regular basis, so he should probably be applauded for standing up for himself. Unfortunately that isn't the case; although, to be fair, no news outlet, nor the school nor Richard himself will say what he did to confront his bully that got him expelled, but I like to think it involved jamming a cafeteria tray in some kid's ass.
Being Gay
With the state of homophobia in the world being what it is, it's not surprising that calling someone "gay" is still a favorite insult on schoolyards across America. So in the spirit of that, let me just say it's super gay of a school to expel a student for being gay.
Kaitlyn Hunt was an 18-year-old senior from Florida. It was reported initially that was 17 when she met her girlfriend, a younger student, often reported as 15 at her school who was taking classes with upperclassmen, which is where the two met. Sometime later, with Kaitlyn being 18 and her girlfriend 14, Kaitlyn was arrested and charged with a felony -- sexual battery of a minor -- and expelled from her school. Kate says they waited until she was 18 to charge her so that it was a crime and they were cool with it before then. That's what Kate says.
According to Kaitlyn it was the parents of her girlfriend that filed criminal charges, unhappy either that their daughter was in a lesbian relationship or that they hadn't done anything to make themselves internationally reviled lately. Also according to Kaitlyn, her girlfriend's parents are very religious and feel being gay is a sin, one that apparently Kaitlyn slipped into their daughter's apple juice or some such. Whatever the case, a judge initially ruled that Kaitlyn was free to stay in classes and the school supported her. Then the school board decided nah, let's be dicks, and they kicked her out. Why? Please refer back to the dick comment.
I'm such a dick I shrink when I go swimming.
UPDATE: In a fun twist of events, turns out I'm full of shit, almost completely unintentionally. While many commenters disagreed with me in principal on this(I still think 2 highschool kids boning is pretty normal, even if one unfortunately is a couple years older than the other), a few of you actually know facts and shit and that's awesome. I was directed to some sites which illuminate this tale a little more, including the info that Kate had been 18 when the girls met (the story I read originally said 17), they'd had sex several times (or engaged in various, nefarious in-school pokings around) and that the 14 year old girl's parents didn't wait for shit, they tried to stop the relationship as soon as they found out about it. Well don't I feel like a douche?
Looks like most of the media reports were based on what Kate and her family had to say rather than using, ya know, facts and stuff. And I fell for the oldest trick in the book, believing shit in the media. Oh man, what a rube. So given what I know now I can say this is the story of an 18 year old woman who had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old girl. She was asked to stop multiple times and the 14 year old even an away to be with her at one point. Eventually the 14 year old's parents took legal action.
As near as I can tell, Kate was being allowed to go to school despite all this but at some point the school changed their mind citing a breach of the school code of conduct. Probably because the school doesn't support statutory rape, which we should get behind because it's a decent reason for expulsion and if they would have said that from the get go, well the, wouldn't that have been something?
Seeing as this ruins this entry and its presence in my article, may I suggest you read upon the kid who was punished for stopping a stabbing in his classroom, because his school does not support heroism. Go figure.
Refusing to Be Tracked by RFID
When the Xbox One was revealed, people all around the world were busy doing literally a million more important things than paying attention to a press conference about a gaming system. But some people weren't. Bloggers, mostly, because they never have anything important to do. And many of those people immediately doubled the layer of tin foil on their helmets upon learning that the Xbox One was an Orwellian nightmare of privacy invasion. It has an always-on camera and microphone and requires an Internet connection to run. It's basically a toilet cam that's not in the toilet but in your house. Bill Gates will be fapping to you fapping to porn in no time.
Fap station: engaged.
We're all quite leery of being monitored in the modern world because we want our privacy. Even if we do nothing with it and we all know that, if there was a camera in our homes, the worst thing it would be likely to pick up are your eating habits and how often you sit on the couch naked. But some things push the limits of good sense to the extreme, like a pilot RFID tracking system being used in some highschool that requires students to wear radio transmitters, kind of like the tags they put on wild animals to track their migrating and breeding habits. Only it's more to make sure the students aren't migrating and, probably to an extent, breeding.
Andrea Hernandez, a senior at her high school, didn't take much of a shine to the idea of being tagged like a pair of sneakers at Wal-Mart, so she refused to wear the RFID necklace that the school demands students wear. The school offered to let her wear a badge with no chip in it so it just looks like she's being tracked like an animal, and she refused that, too.
For whatever curious reason, when the case went before a judge, who said Andrea actually has to wear this chip or go to a different school, she and her family argued against it mostly on religious grounds -- they felt it was the mark of the beast. Few news articles mentioned the more alarming issue of how the school is tagging children like bears in a national park and how easy it is now for the janitor to sit in a room and observe how much time your kid spends on the toilet every day.
Watching Glee
No one should ever watch Glee. But part of what makes America great is that everyone can watch Glee. You can put your face in a panini press, too. Or marry Courtney Stodden. Chris Peterman wanted to watch Glee one day, probably because he messed up his meds or had low blood sugar and wasn't thinking straight. It doesn't matter why.
Unfortunately for Peterman, he was a student at Bob Jones University, which, if you're not familiar, is technically an institute for higher learning with an emphasis on rejecting modern thought and instead focusing on ensuring its students and alumni are firmly rooted in a past when certain people, let's call them everyone besides white men, were considered property, God was an American who loved capitalism and hated hippies and everyone wore pressed slacks all the time. That's probably not part of the school's mission statement, but their ducks tend to quack that way, so forgive any assumptions.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a piece of shit.
Because Bob Jones is so wholesome, which is to say awful and meddlesome, it expects students to adhere to certain codes of conduct even off campus. And while many schools will do the same and will take action against a student who is a drug dealer or, you know, a murderer, rarely do accredited schools have the time or the resources to obtain the fucks to give about what you watch on TV. Bob Jones is all up on that bitch, though. They have a list of no-no shows. Glee was one of them. (It's on account of the gay, you see. Glee is dripping in gay; it's like a rotisserie chicken just spinning in its own gay.) The school said it was because Glee is morally reprehensible.
Peterman, at a Starbucks off campus, opted to watch Glee on his computer, and while in this instance you and Bob Jones probably both agree you should never do that to other people at a Starbucks, the school went the extra mile and kicked his ass out for this and posting the lyrics to a Christian rock song, preventing him from graduating.
Now if you're a more cynical person you might look into how Peterman was also running a Facebook page at the time that was rather critical of a man on the board of Bob Jones who covered up the rape of a 15-year-old girl, but it was the Glee incident that they used to justify giving him the boot after assuring him he was a bad Christian for questioning authority figures and bringing shame onto the school. What a novel approach to abusing someone with religion. I wonder if anyone else has ever thought of it.