The Place Where Ludington Talks
Mason County Central Schools Believe in Zero Tolerance, Zero Information
You may recall an odd case six years ago where a 7 year old kid who got suspended from elementary school after he took a few bites out of a pop-tart while at a school breakfast, and noticed that the half-eaten pastry looked like a gun and pointed it at his peers in fun.
You may not have heard that the parents of the ADHD boy appealed to the school to get the ridiculous incident expunged off his school records, an appeal which was turned down by the schools superintendent, a hearing examiner, the county school board, the State Board of Education and a county Circuit Court judge. It was finally settled in a special appeals process with an undisclosed settlement arising, likely covering the parent's massive legal bills and the expungement of the word gun from the boy's records.
Over the last few years, Mason County Central (MCC) Schools has become the epitome of a tyrannical system, that implements zero tolerance policies with seemingly zero amounts of common sense and transparency. Ludington schools have had their moments, threatening civil and criminal action against one of their students for having the acumen to place a Swastika on the Google High School map but common sense and some tolerance eventually took hold.
MCC Schools, led by Superintendent Jeff Mount during this devolution, has had plenty of issues with transparency in the past: whether it's the safety of MCC's buses or why the busses remained unsafe the next year, or mischievously defying disclosure of public records dealing with a coach accused of CSC.
They have had issues with zero tolerance policy not making sense, including the year suspension for an empty hunting gun left in the back of a student's truck from the previous day's hunt. Maybe you've got a harmless pocket knife left in your pocket from the morning's fishing excursion, maybe MCC has a year's suspension for you (as they did to another student). The immediate and indefinite suspension of a student for having a confederate flag on the back of his truck, because Mount thought other students may be offended by the racist history of the symbol(when the school demonstrably never taught such a weird idea) is considered practical.
Let's not forget, Superintendent Mount led the disinformation campaign regarding the custodian and the bathroom incident, where two other white male MCC principals published letters in the local paper defending a custodian who made a mistake, rather than bear any thought as to how the incident affected the young girl of mixed-race involved.
So when an undescribed bomb threat made by a student on social media happened at the MCC Middle School on November 30, I expected the public would never get the full story from either the school or the county sheriff, who perhaps has the worst public record disclosure history in the county. On the day and afterwards, there wasn't any explanation as to what this supposed bomb threat was. Did the student chew a breakfast toaster pastry into the shape of a bomb and Snapchat the event? It was quickly determined to have no credibility, but none of the local TV stations and other media knew what it involved, one reported it was an Instagram posting.
We did know that the student was detained by the sheriff and that harsh penalties were likely to follow. We did see the sheriff talking about the response for over ten minutes without a new word on the nature of the threat in the first place.
The superintendent was his usual understanding self: “This was just a threat, a threat that was made as a joke by the student, these are not jokes, and that’s something that we need to send a clear message to everybody,” said Superintendent, Jeff Mount. “We need to send a clear message to that student and others, that this won’t be tolerated and it can’t happen.”
My mind is not as clear as Jeff Mount's. If I am told that an Instagram post is either a harmless joke or a terroristic threat that threatens to put an otherwise promising local student into a year's suspension and into limited future prospects, I want to see the post (suitably edited to protect the child's identity) and make that determination myself. I don't want that decided by an anal-retentive superintendent and sheriff who want to make a name for themselves as no-nonsense defenders of the community.
Worse, I don't want to see a settlement made after years of court battles between the school and this boy's parents because of the possibility that the school over-reacted. It was only made known today, publicly, that a Ludington school administrator first saw the threatening post and created the furor-- whether it was appropriate or not. We also find out that Superintendent Mount is interested in looking into criminal charges with the county prosecutor, so the suspension likely is going to be for a school year at least, when the school board goes into closed session at their meeting tomorrow.
I will be looking to extricate the Instagram post from the hands of those who seek to inflict significant punishments on a young boy rather than discuss the particulars of the problem with the rest of the public, and whether it was indeed a 'bomb threat' rather than a poorly constructed attempt at humor made by a youth in their transitional years. I have come across too many ridiculous 'pop tart gun' cases to believe these authorities who see a battle flag and an injured man strapped to a hospital gurney as a threat to society.
It's rather odd; I and other students at MCC used to sing "The Burning of the School" song back when I was a kid and well before that. It was commonplace for MCC high school boys to drive their vehicle to school in November after a morning's hunt. Today, students doing much less are being tossed out of school, those who remain are anxious that they may be a victim of a shooting that their trusted authorities seem to believe is an inevitability. And their zero tolerance actions as authorities are only making that a likelier possibility.
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