http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/us/ohio-charge-against-teacher-is-resolved.html?ref=education A teacher and coach accused of trying to thwart an investigation into the rape of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville will have the charge dismissed in exchange for community service at a domestic violence shelter... And there you have it, folks.
For those who don't want to burn one of their 10 free NYT articles: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...enville-city-schools-grand-jury-seth-fluharty from January: http://www.wkyc.com/story/news/2014/01/08/steubenville-principal-charge-being-dropped/4371373/
I'm not a big fan of the registered sex offender thing, which strikes me in most cases as done from the desire to punish rather than to protect future victims, but if you're going to do that penalty, then I suppose you should make the coach and teacher register for life as accessories to sex offenses. Logical, no?
Oh we've been through this before, and of course that is not the point. Anyway, I edited the post because I knew that was coming. Attack my revised version. That would be a different argument.
Your revised post is spot on imho. For one thing, neither of those men should ever hold another teaching position in their lives. I find it hard to think of any school over here who would not instantly fire a staff member who helped a student cover up a crime. Especially such a serious crime.
My school covered up sexual offending by a staff member. I think it was fairly common back then. The good schools sweep criminal actions under the table to avoid bad PR.
My wife did her undergrad work at the OSU and she said that state in general was an absolute piece of shit on so many levels. The case itself proved that and this version of "justice" validates that.
There was a student suicide at one of the "better" high schools in my hometown when I was a sophomore or junior. The local news reported the event but were unusually vague with the details and never said a word about where it happened. The only way we knew it had happened at a school was thru some of that school's students (that the guy told to leave the classroom before he shot himself- he'd brought the gun with him to school). Not exactly a coverup, but certainly the sort of PR move that the influential can get the media to assist in. One of my HS teachers was allegedly seeing a student when I was still in middle. By the time I got to HS, he was married to the woman I'd heard he was seeing. I don't know how old she was (She may very well have been legal- he was early-mid 20s himself, and I don't know that she was ever his student), and I never heard anything from anyone but fellow students, but if gossip is circulating among a student body of 2500 kids, surely an admin had to have heard something. FWIW, he was a basketball coach. Can you really dismiss an entire state based on the observations of one college student? I figure similar things have happened in every state over the years and that this one simply made more news than the others. I've never been to Ohio, but if it's a piece of shit, I don't know what I could say about Ala-dama-BAMA... or Texas.
Then? I'm guessing it'll be common for a very long time. Here's the thing. It's easy to think of strangers in the news as evil predators who prey on innocent victims. It's a lot harder when it's people we know, with fleshed-out lives and personalities. Think of coworkers who sit next to you and talk about what you did over the weekend with - now, imagine they're accused of a horrific crime. Chances are, your instinct is to think there's been some mistake because you think you know the person. The flipside is that you don't know the victims - they're not really people but just theoretical "accusers". You only know them as unknown forces who threw a wrench into what you thought you understood. The result is that you might want to protect the accused and the organization, in which you're emotionally and otherwise invested. It's not right, but you can kinda see how organizations go into close ranks mode.
I'm not willing to go that far, either. I do think Alabama is a piece of shit, for the most part, but I don't think any other state would offer more racial harmony, certainly not one with the percentage of Black residents that Alabama has. All I'd get out of relocation is allegedly better pizza (if I'm allowed into the neighborhoods where said pizza is served) and maybe an MLS team. I used to have these convos in ugrad when guys from the West Coast and Northeast would comment negatively on the South. Ohio may well be a piece of shit, but Texas has been airing filthy laundry since at least 2008. All I'm wondering is how someone from there could go after any state without including his own is all. It'd be like somebody from Arizona talking about Ala-dama-BAMA.
Anecdotal ,not to be taken as evidence of any thing,but... I worked with a guy I thought was a complete and utter creep, one of the ones who was in the DD field because he thought people with disabilities could be manipulated and ordered around more easily than the typical population. Making it worse was the fact that he thought self-care and hygiene assistance were beneath him because he had a BA. Turns out, he was convicted of possessing child porn. Go figure. Sad to say, not surprised.
At my school we had a great example of how it goes down. It became obvious that there were major financial misdealings - fraud even - involving the new head master. So a group of 3 teachers - picture the nerd teachers who were in to screening alfred hitchcock films - certainly not the moronic jock teachers who ran the place - they decided to gather evidence They started to get into the school late at night and started copying all the documentation they could find in the headmasters office. They trailed the executive officer and discovered that he had stolen the schools old tractor when a very expensive replacement was bought. Allegedly it was traded in. A lie. As the whispers increased - one night when they went to break in - their were torchlights in the headmasters office and there he was shredding all the documents they had copied in the dead of night So they went to the board with all the evidence and the headmaster quietly resigned. He got a job in treasury The board simply didn't want any dirt but it took years to undo the massive financial damage that jerk inflicted...
I would say there is a great difference between people that live in the three big cities in Ohio and those that live in wastelands like Steubenville. There is also a huge difference between Cincinnati and Cleveland. Columbus seems to be pretty middle of the road on most issues which can be attributed to the influence of both The Ohio State University and the State Capital. If someone says they are from Ohio it usually doesn't take much conversation to figure out what part.
I get that. Huntsville isn't a big city, more like a big town, but the influx of foreign scientists and military personnel from all over the country in the late 50s has made it an oasis of culture in Alabama. Until very recently, we were hated on like rednecks in Florida hate on Miami. Didn't know that, other than that Cleveland's sports drought (for all the reg season excellence my Braves have shown over the last 20 years, they still wouldn't have a title if the AL champ hadn't been from the one town more snakebitten than Atlanta). What are the differences?