A female junior-high-school principal’s failure to alert the local police of a threat made toward a former student back in 2017, which brought a lawsuit against the El Segundo Unified School District, will cost California taxpayers a million dollars.
“A California school district was ordered to pay $1 million for failing to protect a middle school student who was ‘bullied, tormented and verbally assaulted’ by fellow teens who started a petition to end her life.
A jury ruled that the El Segundo Unified School District was negligent in training and supervising its workers, who then failed to safeguard 13-year-old Eleri Irons from three bullies between November 2017 and June 2018.
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| El Segundo Middle School was ordered to pay $1,000,000 |
A lawsuit filed in 2019 reportedly alleged Eleri ‘suffered PTSD, cut herself and sought refuge in the school nurse’s office nearly every lunch break’.
The torture began when teachers failed to act after finding out about a petition that was circulating in school titled ‘Let’s kill Eleri Irons’.
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Eleri Irons was thirteen years old when she was supposedly treated badly in school |
When Eleri’s parents did ask school officials for help, they ‘dismissed the concerns as drama over a teen love triangle’, the teen’s attorney Christa Ramey told the paper.
Former El Segundo Middle School principal Melissa Gooden, who is now an executive director of human resources with the district, allegedly lied about calling police as soon as she learned of the death threat in June 2018, Ramey reportedly said” -Jesse O’Neill, New York Post
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| Melissa Gooden served as the El Segundo Middle School principal |
I would take exception to the notion that thirteen-year-olds were historically unable to tolerate the psychological effects that came along with both social ostracism and rejection.
In the days of yore, while children certainly fought and played tricks on one another (Michelangelo even had his nose broken by a young tormentor during his adolescence), teenage apprentices of the Renaissance era were traditionally said to have been eager and full of cheer.
“Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere”. -Paul Graham
The very concept of the hormone-crazed teenager seems to be coeval with modern-day suburbia.
Unfortunately, this young lady will never know of the benefit of learning early on in life that no one is necessarily going to come to your defense and that you better just shut your mouth or find some way to stick up for yourself.
If you make it clear to everyone around you that you are not a soft target, there is a high probability that you’ll never have to experience a bully attempting to bother you or any sort of otherwise hostile encounter for that matter.
You may feel as sorry as you like for this blonde girl, but she doesn’t deserve the monetary compensation she was rewarded nor anything other than an apology from the school.
In actuality, the only people she has the right to blame for her ill-treatment, besides her actual abusers themselves, are her parents. Keeping one’s child safe is both a mother’s and a father’s paramount obligation to their children.
It’s rather difficult to understand why parents with even a vestigial understanding of what comprises a contemporary K-12 public education would ever sentence their children to twelve years of mindless, systematic indoctrination and confinement.
Schools nowadays have no meaningful purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain amount of time each day. And, more importantly, they’re unable to guarantee the well-being of each and every child they’re tasked with monitoring.
Most incredulously, now that it’s become common knowledge that homeschoolers are scholastically ahead of their group-schooled peers, critics of homeschooling doltishly attempt to use the “socialization” argument.
Even an education major ought to be capable of detecting the ironic weakness in the assertion that government schooling makes for an unrivaled communal environment and cooperative experience, for the sacrifice would be made for the sake of their children learning and acquiring the social graces most suitable for something analogous to The Lord of the Flies.