I honestly don’t know what the difference is between Florida and Hell these days. They’re both extremely hot and they’re run by devils. Add to that fact, that they torment children under something called the “Baker Act” and if Florida isn’t Hell and Ron DeSantis isn’t Satan, they’ll certainly do until the real thing comes along. VICE News:
After a Florida teacher mistook a third grader’s drawing of a person hugging a rocket for male genitalia, police seized the child for an involuntary psychiatric examination and threw her into the back of a squad car, according to a new federal lawsuit.
A group of parents and advocates filed the complaint against the School Board of Palm Beach County and local officials Tuesday. What happened to the third-grader, who was 8 years old at the time of the incident, is often called being “Baker Acted,” after a Florida law that allows children to be taken to a facility for an involuntary mental health exam if they’re suspected of seriously harming themselves or others in the near future.
At least 1,216 kids were “Baker Acted” in the Palm Beach County School District between the 2016 school year and 2020 school year, according to the lawsuit. As a result, hundreds were removed from their classrooms each year, handcuffed, and driven away by police employed by the school district.
Those impacted were disproportionately Black, including the third-grader who was traumatized, according to the lawsuit. Some allegedly had developmental disabilities and didn’t meet the statutory criteria for involuntary psychiatric examinations. And in several circumstances, the lawsuit alleges, the Palm Beach County School District used the law in a harmful, illegal way.
“Hundreds of students in Palm Beach County are needlessly being pushed out of school and placed in psychiatric facilities for the most trivial and inappropriate reasons that fall far short of what is allowed under the Baker Act,” Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit, said in a statement. “Sadly, Black students and students with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to this overzealous practice, and we’re suing to put an end to it.”
The thing that blows me away about this, is if anybody is crazy, it’s the teacher who decided that an eight-year-old kid would not only know what an erect penis looks like but would feel comfortable drawing a picture of herself hugging a giant one. That beggars the imagination a little bit, I’m sorry. it would be humorous that the whack a mole teacher projected her own hang ups onto the kid’s artwork but for the not funny at all harm done to the child.
I guess I should be grateful I didn’t grow up in Florida. I remember upsetting the teacher in the second grade when I colored farm animals in art deco. I had a turquoise chicken and a hot pink cow with lime green stripes and a lavender pig — I was having a blast, but I got rebuked for this. Apparently the purpose of the exercise was to show that you knew what farm animals actually looked like. I knew what they looked like, I wanted to make them look better.
But now I am grateful that all I got was a scolding and I wasn’t slapped in handcuffs and thrown in the back of a squad car and taken to the psych ward. The child in this story clearly had some kind of imagination, if she was drawing a rocket, and it blew up because the woman teaching here obviously had no imagination, not to mention judgement, so she put the most deranged spin possible on the situation.
I don’t like to disparage teachers because they are hardworking, underpaid people and in this day and age of widespread school shootings they literally take their lives in their hands when they go into the classroom, but this Baker Act sounds totally nuts to me.
Lil Blue Sock nails it. This treatment of an eight year old was criminal.
An eight year old should not be subjected to this.
This amounts to child abuse, in my opinion.
The mindset of these everyday “authorities” is insane. They all need psychotherapy.
I hope the teacher(s),the principal.and the cops were all.fired. I was a public school librarian. There were only two kids in 4 years that I would believe needed a psych exam. One I had to take a knife from– he bounced between public school,,juvie and Shepherd Pratt, already diagnosed as psychopath. The other was gonna be joining him because he was,dealing drugs and had knocked down a,safety, kneed him.in the groin,,and beat him.badly before we could intervene. Another one with Antisocial Personality Disorder. The little jerk physically threatened me and since I was 5’3″ and 120 pounds,,he outweighed me and was,2 inches taller,,I believed he could do me some definite damage,,although He was only 14. He was,finally, expelled and went to.juvie.
I have to wonder about some special ed teachers. One I knew bragged about decking autistic kids.
I read page 24-27, the relevant passage in the 78-page complaint. It implies that the school often called her mother to sit with her children in school over “minor matters.” Schools do not ask parents to sit with their children in class over minor matters. A child has to be pretty disruptive for the school to make this request. We also do not know if the interpretation attributed to the teacher was what the teacher actually thought. We are also being asked to wholly discount the officer’s Incident Report and the School Discipline Referral. If law enforcement is being summoned too quickly or handcuffs are being used gratuitously, this situation needs to be looked into. However, the complaint is only one side of the story. We should know better than to over-extrapolate and possibly jump to conclusions.