On one hand, we have school officials who freak out over a quarter-sized plastic toy gun. On the other hand, we have school officials who freak out and punish kids who stand up to bullies. On both hands, we have idiots who are destroying kids. This incident happened in Canada, but could have happened in Maryland or Massachusetts or nearly anywhere school officials have gone bonkers.
Briar MacLean was sitting in class during a study period Tuesday, the teacher was on the other side of the room and, as Grade 7 bullies are wont to do, one kid started harassing another.
“I was in between two desks and he was poking and prodding the guy,” Briar, 13, said at the kitchen table of his Calgary home Friday.
“He put him in a headlock, and I saw that.”
He added he didn’t see the knife, but “I heard the flick, and I heard them say there was a knife.”
Most kids probably wouldn’t intervene. Briar acted courageously, and did. He pushed the bully away and may have saved the other kid’s life.
No good deed goes unpunished, in today’s schoolhouse.
“I got called to the office and I wasn’t able to leave until the end of the day,” he said.
That’s when Leah O’Donnell, Briar’s mother, received a call from the vice-principal.
“They phoned me and said, ‘Briar was involved in an incident today,’” she said. “That he decided to ‘play hero’ and jump in.”
Ms. O’Donnell was politely informed the school did not “condone heroics,” she said. Instead, Briar should have found a teacher to handle the situation.
“I asked: ‘In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?’ She said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we ‘don’t condone heroics in this school.’ ”
What an apt way to say it…
The school called the police on Briar, and his locker was searched.
For doing the right thing.
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