How a Texas girl scared of school shootings was punished

[Nevilledog]

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2023/03/02/how-a-texas-girl-scared-of-school-shootings-was-punished/

No paywall
https://archive.is/vfP5L

The 13-year-old girl was in gym class when she said she heard a boy tell another classmate, “Don’t come to school tomorrow.”

She didn’t think much of it at first.

But by the end of the school day, the eighth-grader couldn’t stop turning those words over in her head. After all, her childhood has been punctuated by shootings: Newtown when she was a toddler. Parkland when she was in elementary school. Uvalde, last year, when 19 children and two teachers were gunned down 384 miles from her school.

The sentence – “Don’t come to school tomorrow” – sounded scary, one of those warning signs people reconsider after something bad happens. It kept bouncing through her mind as she packed up her journals and climbed into her grandpa’s car for the drive home. She decided to tell her friends what she heard in gym class and what she thought it could mean.

“this is genuinely scaring the sh– out of me,” she messaged half a dozen friends in her group chat at 4:42 p.m. Then, one minute later, “lets see if i can tell my mom without crying.”

The fallout from these messages would upend the next several weeks of the girl’s life, derailing her education and shaking her sense of self. The Dallas Morning News is not naming the girl because she is a minor.

*snip*

[Karadeniz]

1. Despicable!!!!

[Bev54]

2. Stupidity in the hands of authority, seems to be an epidemic in the country.

[scarletlib]

3. A generation and more of children traumatized by gun violence and the threats as well.

Kids freaked out by constant mass shootings and school shootings. A frightened young girl doesn’t respond the exact way the school administrators think she should and further traumatize her with inappropriate punishment.

Poor kids. I get upset just reading about this.

[regnaD kciN]

4. "If you see something, say something"...

…except if you’re a Black teenage girl in Texas.

[crickets]

5. There is no excuse for the way this poor girl was treated.

Kudos to her mom for pushing back until she was allowed to go back to her school, but the damage from the way the school admin behaved is already done. Unacceptable.

[SYFROYH]

6. On the face of it, it's an extreme reaction by the school.

But the article is very selective about quoting just minimal lines of what she texted her friends and that makes me wonder what was actually texted out.