Seriously. This whole article reads like people congratulating themselves for pathologizing this kid's behavior, while not actually doing much about the obvious cause of that condition. They say the kid was suspended, for making a hand gesture in response to bullying. Why weren't the bullies suspended, especially when the pattern of abuse became clear? Perhaps twice as long to send a clear message and let the victim reacclimate to the school when they're not getting bullied. Ultimately it seems like the school administration is still mainly concerned about things that might cause some problem for them, and so is quite content to let such situations fester until the victim reacts in a way for which they too can pile on.
Considering how fked up the world is these days, I was expecting much worse than this. I was expecting imprisonment or psychiatric medication. I was really surprized (in a good way) they didn't even expel him from school.
Being harassed non-stop and only doing a gesture and getting suspended by a gesture when you get much worse is so unfair. Like "let's see if we can create school shooters" level of unfair.
I wonder if the USA has a lot of school shooters because the teachers and administrators are dumb like this and not because of other reasons. If adults misunderstand situations like this you feel like nobody has your back.
>I wonder if the USA has a lot of school shooters because the teachers and administrators are dumb like this and not because of other reasons. If adults misunderstand situations like this you feel like nobody has your back.
They don't misunderstand. They are incentivized by the system to behave this way. The ones that can't adapt their morals change their line of work. See also: cops.
Understand, the teachers and administrators are not on the same team!
The admin is a political body, who basically gets their job by being voted in (or more exactly, they are hired by the school board, who is explicitly voted in). They will ignore teachers reporting problems because it's not politically expedient to actually deal with those problems.
In almost all towns, the school board serves the local Old Boys club, not the general public. Bob doesn't give a fuck that his kid is a bully, he still has the most pull in the town. He's not going to sit aside when you punish his kid, even if his kid is demonstrably a bully.
The parents of bullies will not pay attention to "your child is literally harming other kids" but you can bet, the second you suspend their child, they will somehow manage a media campaign that an entire mob will rally behind. "oh that's just what kids do" says the mob. They will then say "we need to bring spanking back into schools" and that will increase the size of the mob.
At no point did the admin help the teacher do their damn job.
You claim to be against X, but there is no X around, so you condition or bring someone to the breaking point to make X appealing to them, then you can claim that you were righteous all along. You create a problem and then "solve" it. In reality you did nothing, except wreck someone else's life, for the sake of your own grandiosity.
Based on what I've read, the bullies wanted the school shooting more than the supposed school shooter. Like, they genuinely wanted him to shoot them.