A 13-Year-Old With Autism Got Arrested After His Backpack Sparked Fear. Only His Stuffed Bunny Was Inside.
A 13-Year-Old With Autism Got Arrested After His Backpack Sparked Fear. Only His Stuffed Bunny Was Inside.
Disability rights advocates said kids like Ty should not be getting arrested under Tennessee’s school threats law. And they tried to push for a broader exception for kids with other kinds of disabilities. It didn’t work.
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A 13-year-old with autism was arrested after his autism sparked fear.
His autism didn't spark fear...saying the school would blow up if anyone looked in his backpack sparked fear. He should not have been arrested but c'mon, if a kid I just met said that to me I'd call the front office, too.
he told his teacher he didn’t want anyone to look in his backpack [...] When the teacher asked why, Ty responded, “Because the whole school will blow up,”
Arresting him was overreacting. Perceiving his words as a threat was not
He wasn’t wrong. Someone looked in his bag and the whole situation got blown up out of proportion over a bunny
Are we doing puns...? I feel like you're doing puns. This was an incendiary situation...
You don't gotta explode about it. Sheesh.
Sure but it wasn't his autism that sparked fear
I agree
If they actually thought he had a bomb in his backpack, why did they open it there in the school?
Some kid randomly saying that and you don't know him, ok. But the school was aware he's autistic, so why did they suddenly forget?
I am saying the admins acted poorly but the teacher was justifiably scared.
The teacher, who had only known Ty for one day, called a school administrator
saying the school would blow up if anyone looked in his backpack sparked fear
If you can't tell a serious threat from mouth noises coming from a 13 year old autistic boy, then I guess its good you presumably don't work with children.
You're right, no 13 year old autistic boy has ever made a serious threat! It's always totally obvious if threatening words from a stranger should be taken seriously or not. Teachers are also always given the full background on every kid in their classroom without exceptions so they should have ignored protocol when hearing a kid say their backpack is going to blow up.
How could I forget that every single kid with malice in their heart fits the brooding edgelord mold from Columbine and that having autism totally precludes violent intentions?
Teachers DO NOT GET PAID ENOUGH for that. And even if they were paid fairly, their job isn't to assess and handle bomb threats.
The teacher was 100% right to call the administrators. The administrators were 100% wrong to do anything more than gently educate him on his word choice.
Yeah - calling the admin was definitely the right thing to do. Even involving the police as reasonable (the whole world would be jumping all over the teachers and admin if they ignored it and something happened).
But goddamn everything after that is a clusterfuck. This law is the perfect example of "well meaning but stupid" legislation that has side effects that were entirely foreseeable but somehow a "shock" to the people who voted for it.
Was the kid black?
being disabled involves the same sort of stigmas