You don’t go to the school first to file criminal charges.
You go there first if you’re looking for assurance of a quick payoff.
When I was in the 7th grade (mid 70’s), our middle school had a multi-purpose room that served as our gym, auditorium, and our lunchroom.
As my class was the last to be served lunch, at the end of our lunch period (actually our lunch ended 10 minutes earlier than all the others), we kids had to gather all the folding chairs and stack them up in racks and also the large folding tables on wheels, which was mostly the boys’ job. These tables when folded were probably about +10’ tall. And this was pretty much unsupervised by any adults.
But the boys often got reckless as boys at that age can be and had “table races”.
One day a group of boys were pushing one of those large folding tables at great speed, not looking where they were going and ran into me as I was gathering folding chairs, knocking me over, the table hitting my head and knocking me out for short time.
The school didn’t call my parents and instead sent me to the nurse’s office where an ice pack was put on the big “egg” on my forehead.
When I got home and my mom and dad saw my “egg” and now my black eye, I told them what happened.
My dad was especially furious and went to the school the next day to talk to the principal.
He reminded the principal that this was not a job for kids, especially unsupervised to do, that his tax dollars paid for janitors whose job this should be and tore her a new “you know what” for not calling my parents or 9-11 when I was briefly knocked unconscious.
He didn’t call the police or file a police report or file a lawsuit, but as a result of his rather heated conversation with the principal, we kids no longer had to do this. We still had to gather the folding chairs, but the janitors had to fold and remove the folding tables.
Huh, I guess I would be considered a “quick payoff” guy by you then.
Whenever my kids had a problem at school, first thing I did was go to the school and talk to the teachers and principal. No sense involving the cops if it is a misunderstanding. That said, when my daughter’s purse was stolen in class, I forced the principal to keep everyone in class and search all their backpacks. Principal did not want to do it because “the kids will miss the bus”. Principal was black, and the kid that stole the purse was black ... but daughter got her purse back and everything in it. I let the Principal know that if the kids got on the bus, I would have the cops come and THEY would search the backpacks. When the purse was found, I told the Principal that the student had to be punished or I would file charges against her.