If You Stop Crying, We'll Let You Play With The Siren On The Way To Jail

Alert readers of this blog (big shout out to you mom) will note that we have often commented on our life in the educorporate world. To recap, we often provided a...ah...challenge to our instructional technicians and as a result became intimately familiar with certain institutional polices involving appropriate behavior and the application of certain...er...behavior modification devices. Still and all, we made it through without being arrested.

A 9-year-old student was arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail Friday for hitting a teacher and stomping on her glasses. The student, who attends Charlotte Harbor School for special needs students, has been diagnosed as bipolar.

Apparently that wasn't a clue.

"Hey, just because you're crazy don't mean you can break the law," said School Resource Officer Brian Pickett. "Next thing you know he'll be scraping his finger nails across the blackboard. Man, I hate that."

Teacher's aide and school custodian Sharron Williams told police the boy punched her in the face and knocked her glasses to the floor after she asked him to sit quietly and stop saying shut up. "I kept saying sit down and shut up you little brat. And he kept responding 'you shut up. I need to wash my hands. I need to wash my hands.' We were like nose to nose and I was just getting ready to come upside his head when he sucker punched me."

The boy was handcuffed at school and taken to the county jail at 4:15 p.m., according to the police report. He was arrested without incident. "Well, what kind of 'incident' can a nine year old cause," said one deputy who asked not to be identified. "Mess up the back seat of the patrol car by peeing his pants?"

The boy was charged with battery on a school official and released from jail that day. "We're not quite sure he understood the charge," said one deputy. "He kept asking if he could take the battery home to put in one of his toys."

The boy has been suspended from school for four days and placed under house arrest for 21 days. "A representative from the Sheriff's Department will visit the home regularly to make sure the child isn't playing in the yard, or watching TV except for school related reasons," said a public relations officer for the department.

"He was very quiet when I got there," the boy's mother Crystal Rice said. "He came right over and got a hug and stayed right next to me and wouldn't say anything. I said, I want you to know what you did was wrong, but what they did was wrong, too. When we get home we'll try and figure out who needs their medication adjusted. You or the cops."