Stupid School News: School Finds Stupidest, Cruelest Possible Way To Punish Blind Kid

A school took away this blind kid needs to get
around and replaced it with a swimming pool noodle.
Just to be cruel, I think.  

Dakota Nafzinger, 8, of the Kansas City area is blind, and uses a cane to help him get around.

Like all eight year olds, he sometimes misbehaves. Though this isn't proven, school officials said he hit somebody with the cane.

If true, yeah, Dakota needed to be disciplined. But school officials decided on the most boneheaded solution possible: They took away his cane and gave him one of those swimming pool noodles to use as a substitute cane.

I guess the "logic," if you can call it that, is that if he hit somebody with a foam swimming pool noodle, he wouldn't hurt anyone since swimming pool noodles are in part design to hit other people with, I suppose.

Of course, a solid cane is how Dakota gets around, so giving him a humiliating noodle, and forcing him into danger and further humiliation from falls and other dangers is mystifying.

Did whoever decided to do this think whatever Dakota might have done wrong makes him deserve injury? Why are they setting up a situation where he might get bullied? Whatever happened to detention?

Of course, this pool noodle incident caused a big public outcry and the school hastily gave Dakota back his regular cane amid the horrible PR.

The North Kansas City School District issued a public apology.

My guess is the higher ups at the school were just as appalled by this as the general public was. It was likely some lower level employee who decided to impose his or her brand of "justice" discipline.

There's a minority of people in authority positions, be they teachers, cops, district attorneys, corporate bosses, politicians, who do this sort of thing. They're psychopaths, or maybe they were bullied as kids and this is their way of achieving vengeance, or they delight in being cruel.

Instead of meting out discipline as necessary and in appropriate dimensions, they think long and hard, it seems, on how best to endanger and humiliate others, just for the sport of it.

They're kind of like the mustache-twisting villains from bad melodramas. They'd be pathetically funny if they weren't so damaging to people.

It seems like schools attract psychopaths, judging from all the weird punishments and excessive discipline seen in some cases. Which must make it hard not only for the kids, but the vast majority of educators, who just want what's good for kids.

I hope the North Kansas City School District determines out who the psychopath was in Dakota's case and fire him or her.

The psychopathic minority among authority figures gives them all a bad name.  And nobody has quite figured out to deal with these awful people. Because if you punish them, they'll turn their wrath on you.

Apparently, it's not easy to deal with, or avoid or get around a psychopath. Which unfortunately means we're going to hear about more outrageous incidents, like the swimming pool noodle for the blind kid.