EXCLUSIVE: Wisconsin School Covers Up “Columbine” Style Manifesto!

This blogger/Mother understands the reasonable suspicion of it all and agrees that the child in this case should be questioned by law enforcement, but the second this child is brought in to be questioned about any criminal activity for which he/she might be charged with a crime, his/her parents should have been notified and a lawyer provided.  

That this doesn't happen is a violation of the grant of in loco parentis authority given to the school by the parents. Because, the second the school decides that they need to act in the interests of the other students(a not unreasonable thing) at the expense of this student, they can no longer be said to be acting in loco parentis - leaving the student to face the overwhelming power and authority of the state alone while still thinking of the school personnel as a sort of extended family - because that is what the grant of in loco parentis is - a grant of authority to act as a parent. 

Our children have rights and they're being violated by school personnel too often in this way and a goodly number of children are harmed by it who have done far less egregious things than this child. In addition, what does this say to the other students? It tells them that our Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely pretty pieces of paper that won't be any protection to them in the real world rather than hard and fast principles by which to govern our society/nation that should be held in respect.

This blogger spent 8 years trying to get legislation through in WI to protect the rights or our children in such circumstances only to have it not brought up for a vote and therefore dismissed at the end of the legislative session, right before all the legislators with whom I had been working on it retired, leaving it to have to go through the whole process a second time with the new ones who preferred safety to freedom. In frustration there was was an unacceptable degree of rudeness to a new aide - at which point it was apparent that this needed to be advanced by someone else lest obscene language were to become too tempting. But no one else has picked it up. 

Homeschool.  Freedom is not safe, it is just safer than the alternatives. Just as an adult has a right to a lawyer when being questioned, so does a child. The problem is that a child is less likely - especially in the context of being questioned by school personnel - to know that they need to ask for one.