Questions

That is School Resource Officer, Deputy Ben Fields slamming a 16 year old high school student in Richland County, SC to the floor.  This came after she refused instructions from the teacher and then a school administrator to stop using her cell phone; and then to report to the office.

Clearly slamming a student to the floor in this situation is extremely excessive and unwarranted.  That's why Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott fired Deputy Fields just days after the incident.  Sheriff Lott said "What he should not have done is throw the student.  Police officers make mistakes too. They're human and they need to be held accountable, and that's what we've done with Deputy Ben Fields."

I applaud his action in firing Deputy Fields.  Clearly what he did was completely inappropriate.  Then Raven Symone threw her two cents into the story on The View.  Here are the comments that landed her in hot water:

"The girl was told multiple times to get off the phone, There’s no right or reason for him to be doing this type of harm, that’s ridiculous. But at the same time, you gotta follow the rules in school. First of all, why are there cell phones in school? This shouldn’t even be a problem to begin with, and he shouldn’t have been acting like that on top of it."

Todd Rutherford says he is the attorney hired by the family of the teen, who he only identified by her first name, Shakara, and he said the following:

"She could have been left alone.  She wasn’t yelling. She wasn’t disrupting the class. She wasn’t a threat to anyone."

He went on to say his client refused to leave because she'd put the phone away and she felt the punishment of being made to leave the classroom and report to the office was "unfair."

Let me repeat that what Deputy Fields did was completely in the wrong.  Whatever Shakara did or said did not warrant physical violence.  But what about Shakara's role in the incident?  Does a high school student who is a minor have the right to arbitrarily refuse to comply with the instructions of their teacher or vice-principal because they feel those instructions are unfair?  I don't believe this to be the case.  I'm not saying she asked to be slammed to the floor, dragged across it, or injured.  But she was defiant and that is at least a partial factor in what happened.  Had she complied with the request to report to the office, there would have been no need to call Deputy Fields to the classroom.

Believe me, I understand defiance.  I spent my last week in the 6th grade being suspended from school (my only suspension ever) because I was defiant.  Without going into too much detail, I wound up in a verbal confrontation with my teacher, Mr. Sherry.  He said something and I told him "you know where you can go Mr. Sherry."  It was a colloquialism of the time that was the polite way of telling someone to "go to hell."  He got very angry and told me to report to the principal's office.

Had he told me to apologize, it wouldn't have happened.  I wasn't going to back down one iota.  He was in the wrong and he probably knew it.  But I wasn't going to be defiant either when it came to him telling me to go see the principal.  I knew I had to do what he said.  I was in no position to judge the fairness of his action in any event, and even if I had, telling me to go be disciplined for my defiance was well within his authority.

The lesson I learned early on is that when you've been told you're doing something wrong, you don't argue at that moment.  At least not when it is a teacher, police officer or other person in an authority position.  You can always argue the rights and wrongs later.  If this Shakara felt the punishment of being made to leave was unfair, the proper person to take that up with would have been that vice-principal, in the privacy of their office.

The question is, just what should Deputy Fields have done.  I'll offer my thoughts and I'd be very interested in yours.  I think he should have attempted to deescalate the situation.  Maybe he could have just asked Shakara to sit quietly until the end of class and then asked her to accompany him to the office.  If she'd refused, perhaps then the school should have contacted the parents.  No employee of a school should ever place a hand on a child, unless it is in self-defense and the employee truly feels their life is in danger.

I saw a career teacher lose their job once, because they reacted physically when a student acted up.  This student struck the teacher.  She then slapped the student across the face.  The student was not allowed to return to school the following year.  The teacher lost her job.  You don't put your hands on a minor child in any school environment unless someone's life is at risk.

Can we fault the teacher for poor classroom management?  I'll leave that judgment up to the professional educators of children.  I'm fortunate that I only teach adults these days, although there are moments when my students will act quite childish.