This morning I was watching the news while jogging. I saw that a kindergarten boy in Queens, New York was handcuffed to a chair by school safety officers for hitting adults. He was also physically restrained by two safety officers. The boy was then transported to a psych hospital for an evaluation. This was all without any notification of or permission from the boy’s family. To make matters even worse, if that’s possible, this boy has a diagnosis of ADHD, which means he should have had an IEP, a plan to help him, and any specialized services he needed.

When I was in first grade on the lower east side of Manhattan I had a teacher named Mrs. Lee. She would scream at us a lot, red-in-the-face, out-of-control screams. She’d slam her ruler down right beside our hands. If she was trying to intimidate us, it surely worked on me–I was terrified. And that treatment was nothing compared with the way she treated the boy she hated.

I think his name was Tommy, but I don’t recall for sure. I never saw him doing anything wrong, but then I spent most of my time with my hands folded on my desk so I wouldn’t get into trouble. Anyway, Mrs. Lee would periodically get very angry at this boy. She’d take his chair and put it in the girl’s coat closet (so he’d be extra humiliated), tie him into the chair IIRC with a jump rope, and ‘bolt’ the closet closed with a ruler through the door handles.

Mrs. Lee’s legacy is one of the reasons I home school. I’ve always felt silly saying that before, because I knew that no teacher would behave that way these days. I figured I was protecting my daughter from a memory and not from a real danger.

Turns out I was wrong.