After 15 year old Pheobe Prince committed suicide because she was being bullied in nearby South Hadley, Massachusetts, the teachers and administrators at Wire Village School in Spencer, Mass., asked their students to make a list of the school’s worst bullies. They wanted to be sure that they were doing everything they could to protect their students from the same fate. But when Tom Gebo, 11, was suspended from recess for ranking number 6 on the bully list, his mother Danielle thought her son was being bullied a bit himself.
Tom freely admits that he bullied his classmates. He even put his own name on the list of bullies when asked by teachers. ”I had picked on a few kids, so I wrote that I bullied some kids and I signed my name,” he told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. But Danielle Gebo filed a complaint anyway.
When Superintendent Ralph Hicks received Gebo’s complaint, he did some research. It turned out the punishment did, in fact, violate a 1975 Supreme Court Ruling, Gross vs. Lopez, which ruled that public school districts have to conduct hearings before suspending students.
“I had no choice but to stop the punishment,” Hicks told the website ParentDish.
But it wasn’t over. Now other parents are accusing Hicks of being soft on bullies. To make things even more complicated, major news networks have caught the story, including FoxNews which erroneously claimed that other parents of bullies had complained (according to Hicks they have not).
Hicks says he supports the principal’s intent, but due process cannot be ignored. The irony for Hicks is that he understands being bullied all too well. ” I was 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds when I graduated from high school,” Hicks says. ” I know all about bullies.”
