Children, Crime & a Country Losing Common Sense

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Doug Pike (0:52)

All right, welcome to yet another edition of Fifty Plus. My goodness, we're well past 1,000 episodes, episodes in the podcast repository over at the iHeartRadio app. And I intend to keep going for so long as they will let me do so. Weather's about the same as it's been for the last few weeks, maybe even months, with little change in sight on the horizon. On the good news side though, the National Hurricane Center map yet again shows nothing going on for the next several days. And that's always good news as far as I'm concerned this time of year. So plowing ahead, I wanted to get to this story pretty early so I didn't run out of room for it. A mother over in Virginia was charged with and convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for letting her five year old son walk alone down a familiar path in their gated community to go collect some goose feathers. She didn't send him down the street to the convenience store to pick up a pack of cigarettes. She just let the kid walk along a very familiar path to go do something he's done a thousand times while his mother watched out for the other kids in the family. But somewhere on that trail, somebody saw this kid walking down the path and called the police who responded and dragged CPS into it. And the result, a sentence of six months in jail, which by the way was suspended because she's eight months pregnant, and the tough part for her, seven years on the Virginia Child Abuse and Neglect Central Registry. Seven years. That means she won't be able to volunteer to serve in her son's classrooms until he's in the sixth grade. And right now he's five years old. Speaking of children, and I will every chance I get to highlight something good about something that happened to a child, or to let you know that some child was being abused in some way.

And this one from Baton Rouge is one of those latter types of stories. Came from an msn.com piece. The story of a 12 year old autistic boy whose mother sensed something was wrong when his personality and demeanor took sharp turns for the worse. Sensing, and correctly so, I'll add, sensing that the issue had something to do with school, his mother tucked a recorder into his backpack. And when she heard what that recorder had captured, she was quite shocked, as any mother would be. As it turned out, both his teachers in this special needs school had made very insensitive and mean comments about that boy. And for the first time in a long time, since public schools especially tend to cling together and not accept any responsibility for bad things, unless you want to drag them into court, this time the school administrators actually sided with the family and dismissed both of those teachers. Teachers are human, I get that, and they're gonna make mistakes sometimes, but they have a responsibility to be exceptional humans, exceptional adults. They are singularly responsible for educating rooms full of children, no matter what their limitations or disabilities. And that sometimes takes more patience, I suppose, than most people could ever muster. Some people who can't tackle that task wind up being teachers anyway, and that doesn't always turn out well for their students. That's what happened in Baton Rouge to this one poor little 12 year old boy. And I hope the right people have gotten with him and explained to him that he didn't do anything wrong, that he didn't deserve whatever they said to him. He's just a kid trying to go to school and learn whatever he's supposed to learn in school. And any teacher who might be in a school and think differently, that those kids somehow are doing something wrong or something's wrong with them, out they go, every one of them. Try for a minute to imagine the grief and the confusion of that young autistic boy. If his teachers hadn't been recorded and he'd been exposed to more and more of that unnecessary insensitivity and cruelty, they could have scarred him for life. Oh, here's another story I wanted to follow up on from yesterday after I told you about the California woman who used a company credit card to make $4 million in personal purchases over about four or five years. I could not imagine how she did that. And my curiosity finally got the better of me and I went looking.