This story has been haunting me for a couple of days now, since I first heard it on the news. Maybe it's because I've attended more than my fair share of graduations in my lifetime. I went back and forth about blogging it because I was a little too pissed to think straight. The facts of the story are that Danielle, a dropout of Quinnipiac University, failed to tell her mother she was no longer attending in school. Instead, she took the tuition money she was sending, about 55thousand dollars, and went about her business for the year. But then it came time for graduation. Her mother showed up along with all the other parents, to see her daughter graduate. Of course Danielle’s name was not in the program and she would not be called on stage. She had to do something. So she called in a bomb threat at the school library twenty minutes before the ceremony was due to start. I guess that didn’t cause enough of a commotion to halt the graduation, so she followed that call up with another call saying there were several bombs all over the campus, saying “You haven’t cleared out graduation. That’s not a good idea.” The police managed to trace the calls to her phone and found her amongst other graduates wearing a cap and gown she had bought. She was arrested and confessed. Her mother was in shock, but managed to bail her daughter out of jail.
Now where do you start with a story like this one? What kind of mind conceives an idea like this? They says she panicked when her relatives didn’t see her name in the program, but what did she expect? She had a year to come to this realization. She had a year to tell her mother the truth. Instead she waits till the last minute and almost ruins graduation for all the other students and their families. Fortunately the delay was only 90 minutes. However, her actions were disturbing and have resulted in her arrest and being charged with falsely reporting an incident and first-degree threatening. Personally, I don’t think this is serious enough and I hope they come up with more serious charges.
AND…if this wasn’t bad enough…in a local story not far from where I live, two Brooklyn boys are accused of poisoning their teacher with rat poison in her water bottle. Fortunately, the poison only caused her to become nauseated the next day and she wasn’t made seriously ill or worse. The boys were 9 and 12 years old and I doubt they will be punish to the extent necessary to teach them a good lesson. A teacher at the same school had reported something suspicious about her water to authorities three weeks ago, but nothing was done. It’s not until something actually happens that officials spring into action. In this incident, the parent of a child who witnessed what the boys did, reported it to the school and the teacher went for medical treatment after being advised.
What the hell is going on in today’s world? When I was in fourth grade the biggest offense students committed was chewing gum in class or taking a cough drop without permission. I remember clearly, one day in sixth grade, when a classmate was obviously suffering from a bad cold and cough. She took a cough drop. No one except the teacher noticed she had something in her mouth. The teacher went up to her desk and demanded to know what she had in her mouth. The girl answered a cough drop. The teacher told her to spit it out and confiscated the box so she couldn’t do it again. Her crime? She had failed to ask permission or bring a note from her parent. And this doesn’t excuse her, but she was the smartest student in the class/school.
Everyday we hear stories and shake our heads in disbelief. It’s not so much about what is becoming of our society, as it is how much worse can it get? These outrageous stories are coming up on a daily basis. Are we ever going to do something besides sit around and wait for the next school shooting? I never read a story that is about something being done to prevent these things, just more and more incidents.
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