A teenage boy's allegations that his father abused him may have won him enough sympathy that school officials kidnapped him.
The fifteen-year-old didn't come home from his South Carolina high school one day, but when his desperate father went to police, he soon learned the boy had taken off for his mother's home in New York.
Keith Jenkins has legal custody of his son, but he alleges the boy's principal and a school janitor ignored that when they helped the teen catch a Greyhound bus headed northward. The school staff has told police the boy claimed he was being abused - allegations, by the way, that the police say have been investigated and were unfounded.
Even if a child were being abused, how does a school principal decide the best option is to put a teenager on a bus for a ten- to twelve-hour trip, with no idea what is going to happen next? New York City isn't the scary, scary place that some people make it out to be, but for a kid, alone, especially a kid unfamiliar with the city, pulling up in the Port Authority is not exactly a safe alternative. Did they know what he was going to do once he got there? That he wasn't headed up to the city to meet a stranger he'd been chatting with online or to try to seek his fame and fortune as a fifteen-year-old rock star (come on, teenagers watch a LOT of TV)? That his mother was any better parent than his father?
A court had already given his father legal custody - apparently for a reason. So why did school officials think they were smarter than a judge?
School officials have no business mediating divorce and custody disputes. That's why there are family courts, judges, social workers. . . The same goes for child abuse allegations. The school is mandated to report them - and that's where it should end. Their business is in being there for kids, which puts them much too close to the issue to look at it objectively. Child abuse allegations are serious - but sometimes, they're just allegations. Kids lie sometimes (often for attention), and anything less than a thorough investigation doesn't help anyone.
How would you feel if your school district was stepping in to your divorce?
Image: NYCSubway.org
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