Second Thoughts About Sharing Private Thoughts
Trust me, I have many more friends who are high school teachers than high school football players. My father was a teacher, coach and small-town superintendent. So, if I have any biases or loyalties, they’re in the direction of school personnel.
For the life of me, though, I don’t understand the hardball Tesoro High School officials are playing against senior honor students and football standouts Sam Smith and Scott McKnight. On Friday, the two boys missed their third week of school and fourth straight football game while awaiting a hearing later this month on whether they should be expelled.
Life is about much more than football, but the administration may well have done needless and significant damage to McKnight and Smith.
The boys were suspended Oct. 20 after turning in essays in a creative-writing class. The contents haven’t been made public, but the Capistrano Unified School District has said they amounted to death threats against the teacher. The impression left is that the language was vivid and vile.
The issue is touchy, but to me, not complicated. It hinges on a single question: Did the boys think that what they were writing wouldn’t be read by anyone?
The boys, through attorney Jeoffrey L.S. Robinson, insist that the teacher told students she wouldn’t read what anyone wrote. Rather, Robinson says, she said she’d only check to see if students filled the requisite pages.
A number of students will back up that contention, Robinson says.
“The whole purpose [of the assignment],” as relayed by the teacher, Robinson says, “was to open yourself up, express whatever is inside you.”
School district attorney David Larsen says it’s not conclusive at all that the essays were to remain unread. Nor does it make sense, he says, for a teacher to assign something she didn’t intend to read. He suggested I get the journals and read them for myself, but they are sealed as part of a court order.
I don’t care what the words are. I’m assuming the worst -- perhaps even worse than what Smith and McKnight actually wrote. Nor am I discounting for a second that the words frightened the teacher.
What matters was whether the boys thought these were private musings. If you’re under the impression that what you write isn’t going to be read, words on paper really amount to nothing more than your thoughts.
To prosecute someone for that -- as officials have done with the suspensions -- is tantamount to punishing thought.
It’s the Thought Police, pure and simple.
What’s the difference, you might say, between Smith’s and McKnight’s “private musings” and those of tragic situations where troubled students wrote dark, private diaries and then shot up the school? The difference is that those shooters hid their schemes.
Smith and McKnight handed theirs in to the teacher.
Who knows why the boys veered off the rails in their essays? Robinson surmises it’s nothing more than whatever mixture of insecurities and angst and other ingredients might be in the heads of certain teenage boys. One of the boy’s fathers, a Newport Beach police sergeant, suggested they were trying to one-up each other and got carried away.
Here’s another thought: Maybe it’s not a good idea to invite teens to write down their innermost thoughts under the auspices of “creative writing.” Maybe you’ll get some off-the-wall imaginings and embellishments, especially if they’re not taking the assignment seriously.
If the administration can make the case that these boys fit the profile of alienated, troubled students, bring it on. What we’ve read so far in the papers is that they’re varsity footballers with grade-point averages of 3.5 and 3.8 who have done charity work locally and in Mexico.
Thoughts are thoughts. We’re entitled to them. Of course, they can turn into deeds. That’s why, even if confidentiality was violated, you take Smith and McKnight to the principal’s office right away and find out what they were up to.
Common sense likely would have turned that into, at most, a few days’ suspension -- and then only to send a message to other kids. And if the teacher wants them out of her classroom, so be it.
But if your “process” takes a month, as will be the case here, you’ve flunked your obligation to fairness. The boys already have lost.
I understand the teacher’s fear and the district’s concern. The prospect of high school violence -- despite national studies showing it’s not any worse than it was 10 years ago -- scares us. We want to spot the deranged kid before he strikes.
But before you label people as budding killers for all the world to see, be sure you’re right.
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.
