Friday, January 22, 2010

Bullying Is Bullying...

...no matter who is doing it. If even a modicum of this story is true, doesn't it make you sick?

Inside is a cauldron of cultural discontent that erupted in violence last month - off-campus and lunchroom attacks on about 50 Asian students, injuring 30, primarily at the hands of blacks. The Asian students, who boycotted classes for more than a week afterward, say they've endured relentless bullying by black students while school officials turned a blind eye to their complaints...

The Philadelphia school district acted with "deliberate indifference" toward the harassment and failed to prevent the Dec. 3 attacks, according to the complaint. It says Asian students' pleas for help and protection were ignored by school employees.

Asian students say black students routinely pelt them with food, beat, punch and kick them in school hallways and bathrooms, and hurl racial epithets like "Hey, Chinese!" and "Yo, Dragon Ball!"...

Principal LaGreta Brown, the school's fourth principal in five years, was cited for a discriminatory attitude, particularly for referring to the advocacy groups' efforts as "the Asian agenda." On the morning of the attacks, the complaint says, she escorted about 10 frightened Vietnamese students past a large group of youths on a sidewalk.

"If you are afraid, then I will walk with you," the advocacy group says she told the students. But she soon walked away and returned to school, the complaint says, and the Vietnamese students were assaulted by 40 students, most of them black...

At one district meeting, students held signs that said "Grown-Ups Let Us Down" and "It's not a question of who beat whom, but who let it happen."

(Superintendent) Ackerman apologized to the students but was criticized for bringing a busload of black "student ambassadors" to one hearing - students who were not involved in the strife. She also stirred tensions when she complained that the cultural crisis was "taking up a lot of my time."


That superintendent needs to be shown the door, if for no other reason than being an idiot.

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