9-year old suspended for 'hate crime'
Robert Anglen The Arizona Republic
Nov. 27, 2007 03:05 PM
A Glendale elementary school principal has admitted to telling a 9-year
old boy that
it is OK to have racist feelings as long as you keep them to yourself.
“As we said to (the boy) when he was in here, in your heart you may have
that
feeling, and that is OK if that is your personal belief,” Abraham Lincoln
Traditional
School Principal Virginia Voinovich said in a tape-recorded parent-teacher
conference.
The boy was suspended for three days this month for allegedly committing a
“hate
crime” by using the expression “brown people.”
In an interview Monday, Voinovich would not address her comments, first
saying she
didn't remember the incident, then demanding a copy of the recording and
finally
insisting that she could not talk about a student's discipline.
The cir***stances of the boy’s suspension itself raise troubling questions
about
student discipline, interrogation and oversight at Abraham Lincoln.
According to school officials, the boy made a statement about “brown
people” to
another elementary student with whom he was having a conflict. They
maintain it was
his second offense using the phrase.
But the tape recording indicates this only came out after another parent
was allowed
to question the boy and elicited from him the statement that he “doesn't
cooperate
with brown people.”
After that was re****ted to the boy's teacher, he was made to stand in
front of his
class and publicly confess what he'd said.
The boy maintains that he never said it; that the words were put in his
mouth by the
parent who questioned him. That parent happens to be the mother of the
student with
whom he is having a conflict—and she happens to work for Abraham Lincoln
as a
detention-room officer.
The tape indicates that rather than just spouting off with racial
invective, the boy
was asked first why he didn't want to cooperate with brown people by the
parent/school official.
In court, this might be called entrapment. Not to mention a conflict of
interest.
Officials at the Wa****ngton Elementary School District, who are supposed
to oversee
Voinovich, wouldn't comment about the boy’s suspension. They said only the
principal
is qualified to talk about it.
Well, the boy’s mother is talking, and she is angry. She has also removed
her son
from the school.
“I want parents to know … that principals can abuse their powers,” Sherry
Neve, 35,
said. “Principals need to have pro-active supervisors. I want the parents
to know
that the principal was influencing my son in a way I wouldn't want him to
be raised.”
Neve said school officials didn’t advise her of the incident until several
days after
they questioned her son. When Neve objected to the suspension during the
conference,
Voinovich told her that she didn't have any rights; that parents give up
their rights
to discipline when they send a child to school, the tape shows.
“If you don't want that, you can take him out of here,” Voinovich said
tersely.
Neve insists that her son is not a racist and that he never differentiated
a person's
color until the school made it in an issue.
“We were raised to be color blind,” she said. “My children were raised the
same way.”
But let's assume for a minute that the boy actually made the comment. Does
this make
him a racist and guilty of a hate crime? Or does it make him a confused
9-year-old in
need of counseling?
Instead of taking an op****tunity to educate the boy and get to the root of
the
problem, the principal taught him another lesson altogether: It's OK to
feel like a
racist as long as you keep your feelings to yourself.
Kids often say the darndest things. Apparently, so do principals.
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