CONCORD, N.H.- The mother of a Concord middle school student is decrying the school district after her daughter was suspended due to a Facebook post.
Kimberly Dell'isola said her daughter was suspended for five days after saying she wished Osama bin Laden killed her math teacher.
While she agrees the post was offensive, Dell'isola said her daughter's free speech should be protected.
"In hindsight, she's mortified that she said that, but she's a 13-year-old kid," Dell'isola said.
She said she frequently checks her daughter's Facebook page, but she hadn't logged on the day of the incident.
Dell'isola said she didn't find out about the incident until she got a call from the school's principal.
She said she agrees with the administrators at Rundlett Middle School that the post was wrong, but thinks the punishment is too harsh.
"You are denying her an education based on something she did at home. That's my business, not your business," Dell'isola said.
She said that while her daughter's profile did have privacy settings on, a parent of one of her daughter's friends reported the post.
"They asked her to open her Facebook and she complied because she generally does what she's told," Dell'isola said.
The mother holds that the issue is a parenting one, and not school related. She said she expressed that sentiment to Principal Tom Sica.
"He just said what she said was really awful. I started laughing and said I agree with you there, but how did it come to you deciding to throw her out of school," Dell'isola said.
She said that while her daughter's suspension is over, she has not returned to class out of fear of facing the teacher she made the comment about.
Dell'isola wants the school to remove her from the class and give her a private math tutor instead.
"She's anxious to go back and terrified to go back all at the same time," Dell'isola said.
This is a tough one to call. On one hand the school has a point because she did wish publicly for the death of her math teacher. But, on the other hand, her Facebook profile was supposed to be private, and Osama Bin Laden is dead, so it's not like she thought it could really happen. It was fantasy. I wonder if the punishment would have been the same if she wished for Voldemort, or somebody like that, to kill her math teacher. Regardless, she was caught and suspended, and she has to suffer the consequences. Which includes going back to math class to face said teacher. There's no way in hell this bitch deserves a private math tutor.
It's gotta suck to be a school kid in this age of technology. When I was in middle school, kids used to pass notes back and forth all the time, talking shit about various teachers or other kids. Back then, even if you were caught red handed with a note saying you wished Jeffery Dahmer would rape then eat your science teacher, you could still always deny that you wrote it and blame it on some other poor sap. Short of bringing in a handwriting expert, they had no way of proving you wrote it. Nowadays, you send a message over Facebook, and it has your name in bold letters forever linking you to the statement. You can't exactly deny that you wrote it now, can you?
Today's technology to a middle schooler is a double-edged sword. It's great for things like online gaming, allowing you to watch any Justin Bieber video instantly, and getting your girlfriend to sext you a picture of her tits. But technology can also come back and bite you in the ass, just like it did for this girl and her Bin Laden post, or when the guy who got his girlfriend to sext him some tits gets busted for child pornography.
ps. I love how the headline for this story had "Bin Laden" in big letters to get people to read it, even though it has nothing to do with him. Let's see if it works for me too.
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