Public School Abuse: Drop Your Pants So We Can Check for Poop

Heather Callaghan
Activist Post

Incredibly, for all this talk of “Bullying Culture,” some abuse is more equal than others. Rarely does the media focus on activities of police, the TSA, school administration and other authorities when the most abhorrent physical, sexual, emotional or mental abuse is right in front of our eyes.

Apparently, if it’s a sanctioned sexual violation of children by an adult stranger in a government institution – no biggie! These would be the same people sanctioned to teach sex ed, with some of the topics being protection from just such an event.

That’s what happened on Monday in Gustine, Texas. In an incident that would make B.F. Skinner giddy, two dozen elementary students from Gustine Independent School District were rounded up, separated into groups of boys and girls in separate rooms and ordered “to pull down their pants to check them to see if they could find anything.” The teachers claimed they had been finding fecal matter on the gym floor.

Such a disregard for dignity and privacy did not go unnoticed…

One mom, Maria Medina, said:

I was furious… I mean, I was furious. If you can’t do your job or you don’t know what you’re doing, you need to be fired. You shouldn’t be here….Wrong is Wrong.

She didn’t think feces on the floor justified a partial strip search. Her daughter Eliza tried to protest but was told she had to, “because all the kids had to.” At least one was age 11 – 11! Like Eliza who said, “I felt uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to do it.” “I felt like they violated my privacy,” she said with a maturity and vocal ability that doesn’t implicate dropping dookies on the floor.

The Superintendent gives the obligatory “that’s not appropriate” and “we don’t condone that” and says “So you would take disciplinary action.” No, you would.

Then, just like that, he minimizes by saying his understanding is that they were told to lower their pants “just a little.” To check their underwear! Eliza, who has a functioning intellect, knows what happened to her and clarified the situation. How far did they have to pull their pants down. “Like…to where your butt is,” she said. Her mom doesn’t believe the school and finds it all unacceptable.

Part of me wonders if schools are pushing the envelope, with the media glorifying it to get people used to the idea. I mean, what made it sound like an appealing idea to the teachers involved? Now it’s a national conversation to see if “maybe we can find a much better way to solve this,” as the Superintendent said. While an internal investigation is ongoing, parents are attending the school board meeting Thursday night to demand accountability.

What I really want to point out with this story is the insanity of abuse and blame toward students to aggressively deflect from what is actually not WWIII. Not many common sense people would think of this route first. And what would happen if they discovered poopy underwear in front of everyone? What were they going to do the “culprit”? Rub his nose in it? BLAME will solve it. Why is it ever acceptable for school systems to treat children with such degradation that is not acceptable anywhere else?

But that’s actually what they did to irrationally pretend to solve a problem. On a twisted power trip, they senselessly shamed them all, violated them and did not solve the problem. Schools that allow this madness are further proving that kids in public school are objects of the state, to be treated poorly.

Some damage isn’t easily undone. How can they wonder at growing homeschooling rates if parents never know what their child might be subjected to next?

I once wrote about a school pressured to stop making children kneel before their principal. It turns out, it was happening elsewhere, but was under the radar until parents discovered the practice and spoke up.

Daisy Luther wrote about her own daughter’s experience with this practice and said,

When children are exposed to this type of ritual at an early age, it programs them to find subservience acceptable. It shuts off that little mechanism in their developing awareness that says, “This makes me feel bad.” It teaches them that this is normal and appropriate.

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Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.

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