Harassers put boy in intensive care; school denies incident

Many of you remember brats from school who made it their mission to gang up on and harass a schoolmate every chance they got. Usually it starts with verbal attacks, and quickly it escalates into physical violence. If left unchecked, it can go on for years.

With schools' deliberate inaction, victims are often left wondering how long it will be before the violence puts them in the hospital. But the serial harassers are slick, and they usually try to make sure they dish out just the right amount of violence to keep it from happening. That way, they can keep at it. With that, school administraitors (sic) who side with the harassers can lie and say the harassment never happened. Without a serious injury, it's the victim's word against the school's.

But now this national shame has deepened to the point where you hear of kids being hospitalized or worse. I was told that a high school student was recently shot to death by a school bully. I don't know the details or what state this was in, but I believe it happened, despite the lack of coverage.

Now an 11-year-old boy from Brickett Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts, has been brutalized so severely that he's in the hospital, paralyzed from the chest down. It happened when a group of assailants pushed the boy down a flight of steps at school. There were witnesses to the assault. At first, it appeared the resulting injury was mild enough for him to finish the day at school, but he did go to the nurse's office because of damage to his leg.

When he woke up the following day, the symptoms were severe enough that the boy was taken to the hospital. Now he is paralyzed and has a collapsed lung and a tracheotomy tube, as he remains in intensive care.

All this is bad enough, but the reaction of the school system (which is now facing a lawsuit from the youngster's family) makes this story even more disgraceful. The school system claims there's no evidence the boy was ever pushed down the stairs at school.

What??? There were eyewitnesses! The school is standing there denying something that had witnesses?

An outrage, certainly. But, sadly, not a surprise.

If you were a victim of serial school harassers, you might find the school's defense to be an all-too-familiar meme. Arrogant school officials - when confronted with evidence of a dangerous attack in their school - will often cry that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax to frame the bullies. In this case, however, I can't imagine that the school's defense is going to wash, considering the victim has been hospitalized for weeks.

There are also witnesses to other attacks against the student going back months before this assault.

Now that kids are winding up in the hospital - or getting killed - are schools going to keep getting away with denying they have a harassment problem?

(Source: http://www.thedailyitemoflynn.com/articles/2008/04/01/news/news01.txt)