Straight-A student completes assignment, is arrested.

From yesterday's Yahoo! News, an update that the student is going to be allowed to return to his school and graduate with his class:

The decision to readmit Lee, an honors student with a 4.2 grade-point average, followed negotiations with school district officials, said attorney Dane Loizzo.

"We all reached the same conclusion, which is that he's not a threat and never was a threat and he should be treated as such," said Loizzo.

Yay. It's a shame it took the intervention of an attorney to get this done. And it looks like the charges will be dropped, as well:

Loizzo said he will ask McHenry County prosecutors on Monday to drop the charges. "We're willing to consider the matter," Assistant McHenry County State's Attorney Tom Carroll said Friday.

You betcha. It was a boneheaded move in charging him in the first place. I can't help but think that the public backlash over this has made the local officials reconsider the wisdom of the charges.

Jim Downey

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Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.

...each of whom had a rather dark sense of humor. I received many calls from the vice principal of their high school, a man in whose fabric irony was deeply woven but who was intellectually immune to it. After kids 1 and 2 gave many occasions to tell the man he was a moron and why, kid 3 (even darker sense of humor) sailed through high school without ever being bothered.

It is one thing to try to identify disturbed young people; to intervene before any possible violence...but that has nothing to do with police & arrest.

If the teacher/school felt this was a disturbed individual they should have arranged for psychiatric intervention...not ARREST!!! Making this a police action instead of a psychiatric action sounds more like the thought police (or write police in this case). Sounds like a slam dunk case for the ACLU to me.

Are we wending our societal way to a mattress room mentality?

That's an awful lot of spelling and grammar errors for a "straight-A" student to be making.

Perhaps we should stop worrying about "disturbing" imagery (and hell, I wrote WAY creepier things for creative writing assignments in my day), and, I don't know, go back to TEACHING?

I 'came of age' during the 90s, and was a junior in high school at the time of the Columbine incident. I was a good kid, smart, didn't do drugs, didn't drink, etc. I also had (and still have) a dark sense of humor and a certain tendency towards iconoclasm and rebellion against minor authorities.

During that same junior year, I switched math classes, opting for a non-honors version of Algebra II to cut my workload. The teacher of this new section was seemingly incapable of understanding my dark humor. For instance, there was a question on one test to which I did not know the answer. After working on the problem for some time, I gave up and next to an equal sign I scrawled the self-deprecating comment "...I hate my life." While this was mainly intended as a joke to show to a friend, I left it on the test when I handed it in. The teacher reported me to the guidance office, and I had to go through the rigamarole of talking to people there and explaining my stupid joke.

Later that year, we were given an assignment that involved working together with a partner. At the time, Ted 'Unabomber' Kaczynski was in the news and being mocked regularly on programs such as SNL. I found his name funny, and wrote him in as a second partner. This, the teacher took silently and did not bother to ask me why I would have written his name as a lab partner.

A week or so later, mere days before the prom, the school planned to do a 'mock crash' in order to demonstrate the dangers of drunk driving. I found this a bit ridiculous, and ironically commented to a friend 'Wouldn't it be funny if somehow I died at the mock crash?' as a way of pointing out how strange it would be to be critically injured at a demonstration putatively geared towards safety. Someone else pointed out that I would become a martyr, to which I sarcastically said 'Oh, yeah, I'm really willing to die for a cause.'

Well, this (in combination with my since-forgotten Unabomber joke) led to ANOTHER guidance referral the day before the prom. Apparently they had a 'two-strike' rule, in that I was not to be allowed unaccompanied on school grounds until I'd undergone a psych evaluation. The rest of the day, I was followed around by a security guard and then herded into a conference room near the principal's office. They searched my locker (finding nothing, of course). They even called my father, a dentist, away from his patients to come down and pick me up. I would not be allowed to go to the prom the next day until I had an emergency psych evaluation at an area hospital. The psychologist there found the whole situation absurd. Further, I had to make SURE that the fax the hospital sent to the school was received the next morning before I could return or go to the prom.

In the end, it all worked out well. I was even allowed to stop attending that algebra class for fear of persecution, instead spending those periods in the library completing assignments, tests, and quizzes on my own. But I'll never forget the hassle and trauma caused by a smart kid with a stupid (but by no means criminal) sense of humor, an overly-nervous teacher, and a school system unwilling to simply TALK to a student about possible issues. Such an irrational climate of fear and zero-tolerance rules is poisonous and has a chilling effect on the free expression of young people.

Grasping at straws and leaping up on a chair like the caricature of a 50s housewife seeing a mouse will NEVER prevent incidents of violence. Worse still, persecuting and alienating potentially 'subversive' types is only MORE likely to force their hand. Instead of trying to understand students, schools choose to suppress them for the sake of their own image and the appearance of 'proactive' strategies. It's a sad thing, really, when the illusion of safety is more important than strategies that might help potentially troubled youths. Very sad, indeed.