I am torn. Obviously this child needs a good swat. She had absolutely no respect for adult authority. But to handcuff her seems a little severe. In addition to some discipline, she needs a mother who will not make exucuses for her bad behavior. It is a shame that such a cute little girl is out of control already.
Had she been properly swatted, this may have been the only time she experienced "personal freedom" in school.
Why? The mother abdicated her responsibilities. Then she told the school they were not to touch her child. Well, if her child is going to act out, the system kicks in. Guess what, you get out of control, and you've been left to the system, the cuffs go on. I am very sorry for this little girl, but not because she's been put in handcuffs. I'm sorry for her because she's got a irresponsible idiot for a mother.
If she had been allowed to continue her tantrum and injured herself or another the school district would have been in even deper trouble.
Once the mom forbade the school to touch her child, she made the cuffing almost inevitable.
Consider how hard it is to handle even a small cat who doesn't want to be handled. To subdue a fractious child without physically harming her is no picnic. And if the kid is used to getting her own way, she's not going to go quietly when someone starts clueing her in on the facts of life.
Padded restraints might have been better, if any were on hand, but compared to causing the child so much pain that she had to comply, to clubbing her or tazing her, I think restraining her with cuffs isn't too bad.
Mind you, I come to this with the esperience of being in a 45 minute battle of wills with a darling litte 5 year old girl who had never had to do a thing for herself. I asked her to take her coat off. She told me to take it off. And the race was on. 45 minutes, tears, and tantrums later, she unbuttoned her coat and joined her playmates. (Two days later she told me she wanted to marry me!)
My wife currently is dealing with a 7 year old girl who has basically wasted an entire school year for her classmates. The school's hands are tied.
And then there's the time when my wife came home with a perfect imprint of a juvenile dental arch -- uppers and lowers -- on her lower arm. I personally would have charged the child with assault and battery, but that's because I'm not a nice person.
Nope, handcuffs are modest and judicious.
What should they have done? The child was completely out of control, destroying property, and school officials had been implicitly warned they would be sued if they so much as touched the girl. Then the mother told them she was too busy to come to the school immediately to deal with it herself.
I understand your revulsion over the handcuffing, but I'm hard-pressed to think of what else they might have done. It seems to me that allowing the child to freely destroy property and physically strike out at other people for an hour and a half is not an acceptable solution.
This is a highly unusual case. The mother (and apparently absent father) should be held strictly accountable, IMO. Lack of parental involvement and discipline is where the real problem appears to lie.
The girl needed to be restrained pure and simple as soon as she became destructive. The thing I don't get is that it appears in the video that by the time the cop got there, she had already calmed down, and was sitting quietly in a chair.
I would have supported some type of restraint, including handcuffing when she was being destructive, but once she calmed down -- as she appeared to do -- I think they were out of line to hand-cuff her.
She needed physical restraint by a parent but her mother would not come (who knows where her father is ?). This is the only legal alternative left in public schools that do not allow corporal punishment. She needed a good spanking followed by parental love.
Of course, that's probably out the window at this point too, considering the circumstances. No doubt mom told her the police couldn't touch her either.
From this article, interview of the mom -
The 31-year-old single mother of three said she is consulting an attorney. Akins, whose last name is different from her daughter's, blamed the assistant principal, Nicole Ross Dibenedetto. She accused Dibenedetto of harping on the girl to the point where she "acted up" in class. "Ever since I told her to stay away from my daughter, there's been problems."
- snip -
As she spoke, her three children rambled through the apartment. The girl, the oldest child, rode a pink bicycle through the living room, one of the training wheels missing. Her brother got up on a table and swatted a light fixture, laughing.
Oy.
I felt the same way...the handcuffing just showed bad judgement but clearly this kid needed to be removed from the classroom. And since we've gone all limp wristed since I was a kid and can't spank in public schools and can't discipline, physically; the thing to do would be put her in a room by herself, call her mother and say your child isn't welcome here until she can behave. Period.