Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction [to abundant evidence of the shooter’s clear and present danger] “truly astounding.”
It was well within the school’s rights to require Mr. Crumbley, who has since pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges, to leave campus, Professor Ross said.
If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”
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Some public school administrators harbor a sort of mulish assumption that public means everyone gets to go there. And stay there.
Or is this about incompetence? Indifference? As charges and lawsuits are brought forward, we will find out.
December 5th, 2021 at 4:27PM
We debate this in our school. The student in this case didn’t have any kind of previous interaction with the school(afaik), and I guess they were reluctant to overreact, especially when the parents were resistant.
We practice these shooter drills, but if someone is in the school, with a gun, its already too late to prevent kids from being killed. The teachers were alert enough to recognize and report his behavior. The admin and the parents blindness had lethal consequences.
December 6th, 2021 at 3:49PM
Matt: Yes, the administrators/psychological staff probably need to take part of the fall on this one. Of course the primary cause was the poor kid’s degenerate parents – yet I worry that, under Michigan laws, the effort to lock them up will fail.
You could argue that the very fact of the parents’ resistance under these obviously dangerous circumstances (his bloody images of people he has shot, etc.) should have if anything galvanized radical action on the part of the administrators. As in: Something is very wrong with this entire family.