From Prisonplanet:
In another unbelievable example of how our public schools are in reality just prisoner training facilities, parents of a Chicago High School teen have filed multiple lawsuits claiming their son came home from school one day crying that he had been strip searched.
“’He came home crying. So I asked him why he was crying,’ said the boy’s father, Anthony Woodman. ‘And he was like hysterical. He tells me he’s been strip-searched,’” reports CBS Chicago.
Working off an anonymous drug tip, the boy says last month two security guards, a Chicago police officer and a female assistant principal took him to a bathroom stall where one of the security guards frisked him.
“And then he searched me with my clothes on. Then he told me to remove my belt. As I undid my belt he pulled my pants and underwear down to my knees,” the boy told CBS.
After that, the boy says one of the security guards grabbed and searched his “privates” in full view of those in attendance, treatment normally reserved for jailed inmates. The search yielded no drugs.
The Woodmans say the humiliation and sexual abuse their son endured has left him psychologically damaged, as he now exhibits signs of withdrawal, depression and aggressiveness. Reportedly, he also has to sleep with his clothes on.
Now the family is suing everyone allegedly involved in the traumatizing incident, including the Chicago Public Schools system and the City of Chicago claiming a civil rights violations.
“What we are claiming is that his civil rights were violated when he was strip searched without cause and unreasonably,” the Woodman’s attorney Julie Herrera told CBS2. (I might also add suits alleging rape and emotional distress.)
A spokeswoman for the Chicago Public Schools said their policies strictly prohibit strip searches but would not comment to CBS about this particular case due to an ongoing investigation.
This is just the latest example of how public schools are becoming more like prisons, where students are treated as suspected criminals and are guilty until proven innocent.
A similar incident occurred in February 2012 when a Georgia middle school student was also forced to strip down after fellow students accused him of having marijuana. No pot was found and the family in that case also sued.
Earlier this month, we reported on a Washington elementrary school that was apparently punishing students by placing them in dark, padded solitary “isolation booths.” The school called them “therapeutic booths” claiming they were only used for special needs students with parental permission, however, one student labeled the booth “the naughty room.”
We’ve also been following the case of Andrea Hernandez, the brave San Antonio High School student that has been fighting for her right to attend school RFID-free after several schools districts, including some in Austin and Dallas Texas, mandated students wear RFID tags that would track them throughout campus and entering and exiting school. Similar RFID technologies are used to track Los Angeles county inmates.
Author Annette Fuentes describes the indoctrination of students to, in sheep-like fashion, unconditionally obey instructions from authorities, no matter how insane, for fear of being singled out as a criminal. She argues that “school-to-prison” and “prison-to-school” pipelines are visibly manifested in U.S. public schools today in her book “Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jail House.” An excerpt from that book appears on the Rutherford Institute website:
“I would say there is a school-to-prison pipeline, but there is also a prison-to-school pipeline. [The use of security hardware (cameras, metal detectors and retina detectors) and the practice of treating students as suspects are strategies of the criminal justice system, and they have been flowing into the schools.] It’s like a two-way street, a two-way system that mixes the educational and criminal justice systems. The end result is that we have schools in which the learning environment has been degraded and undermined because we are teaching kids to fear and feel that they are suspects at any particular time.”
