A judge's ruling, in my opinion, means open season on Baltimore teachers by out of control students in the Baltimore City Public School system.
In April of 2008, I wrote about a situation where a teacher was beat up by a student. However, this time, as other students cheered, another student video taped the assault with a camera telephone.
The trouble began, Jolita Berry said, when she asked a girl in
one of her art classes at Reginald F. Lewis High School to sit down.
The student did not obey, coming closer to confront
the teacher. "She said she's gonna bang me," Berry said. "I said,
'Back up, you're in my space. If you hit me, I'm gonna defend
myself.'"
But Berry, who is 30 and started her job
teaching art at the Northeast Baltimore school in December, did not
defend herself. The girl caught the teacher off guard as other
students cheered her on and screamed, "Hit her!"
"She
just started beating on me relentlessly," Berry said, recalling the
Friday morning incident that left her with a sore shoulder and a
broken blood vessel in her eye.
...
Part of the public outrage stemmed
from how Berry said her principal responded to the incident. She
said the principal told her she'd provoked the attack by telling the
student she would defend herself.
I found that hard to believe. Well, I find this even harder to believe:
Baltimore City Circuit Judge Paul Smith called the ordeal, which
ignited national uproar last April after another student recorded the
fight on a cell phone camera and broadcast it on YouTube, "outrageous
and deplorable," but he ruled Tuesday that too many conflicting
accounts from witnesses prevented him from finding the student guilty
of assault.
This "good child" beat the crap out of a teacher. An adult. Got up in that adult's face because the adult told her to turn down or off a radio.
Students won't lie for another student for a cover up?
A videotape, even if started after the fight, that shows the woman covering up while the student is still banging away? Even for self defense, you can use violence only to the point where you are no longer in danger.
You know what is going to happen? That girl's parents are going to hire a lawyer and sue the city. Meanwhile, knucklehead students who don't like a certain teacher, are putting their heads together to jump the teacher and then say, "The teacher started it."
With the "conflicting information," a judge is going to have to find the next student(s) not guilty.
And even though this happened in Baltimore City, it needs to be noted that assaults of teachers is rising in Baltimore County, Anne Arundel County, Howard County, Cecil County, Harford County...
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