A mom is ready to go to law enforcement about the goings on in her daughter’s seventh-grade classroom.
Since fifth grade, a group of boys has run wild, constantly misbehaving and terrorizing fellow students with no consequences. After one of the boys spit on her daughter and the school did nothing, the mom decided escalation might be necessary.
“Starting around fifth (grade), there have been boys at school who have made the classroom environment into a miserable war zone,” the mom wrote in her Reddit post. “Things like random outbursts, head slamming, gross sexual comments.”
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She not only heard about this horrible behavior from her daughter — who gets headaches from the excessively loud students — but witnessed it firsthand when volunteering at the school.
“The teacher warned me not to leave any thumbtacks accessible while hanging things because the boys would grab them and start stabbing people,” she recalled. “She told me she spent hours each week writing parents about this kind of crap, and the parents respond so little that she asked me if ‘parents see messages’ on the app at all.”
“Yesterday something happened that was next level,” she wrote. “My daughter — now in seventh (grade) — told me that some kid took a swig out of his water bottle and then spit all over her as she was walking by.”
“This is obviously degrading and also carries certain subtexts I find very disturbing,” the mom added.
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Although her daughter informed the teacher about what happened, the incident was not reported because “she knows the school will do nothing about it.”
Unfortunately, this turned out to be true. The school has always done the bare minimum to curtail the boys’ bad behavior, and this situation was no different.
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“I am totally fed up, and I don’t have any faith the school will do anything, but (I) wrote a note to admin asking for their help,” she said. “I came out and said that if they can’t deal with it appropriately, I will escalate to law enforcement.”
“All the discipline I’ve heard about in the past is the school officials having the kids write ‘think sheets’ where they reflect on their behavior,” she continued. “If that’s the extent of the plan, I’m considering pressing charges or at least filing (a) report because spitting on someone is misdemeanor assault in California and carries a $2,000 fine.”
The mom would likely be able to do so. Laws vary from state to state, but spitting is typically considered to be assault.
According to the Spodek Law Group“Legally speaking, assault refers to when one person acts in a way that makes another person afraid they are about to get hurt. It’s threatening behavior that makes someone fear bodily harm.”
“Assault doesn’t require actual physical harm or violence — just the threat,” they clarified. “As gross as it is, spitting on someone can be considered a physical threat.”
This mom insisted that spitting on someone is a misdemeanor in California, and it sounds like she’s right. Orange County attorney William Weinberg said that spitting “could be charged as a simple assault.”
Whether the mom ultimately presses charges or the school steps up and disciplines the unruly students, she has one message: “Assault shouldn’t be OK because a kid is at school.”
To some, it may seem harsh and over-the-top to charge a boy who is presumably also 12 years old with assault. However, he has to learn that what he’s done is wrong. Something has to get through to these boys, and if it’s not going to be their parents or school administrators, maybe law enforcement will be more successful.
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Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news, and human interest topics.
