Case of Racism or Overprotective Zero Tolerance Policy?

[lvstephanie]

14 year-old Ahmed Mohamed has been suspended by his school for 3 days, and may face criminal charges. His "crime"? Making a digital clock to show off to his engineering teacher. This young 9th grader from Irving, Texas has been known for his technical / engineering prowess, built a simple digital clock on Sunday night. However after bringing it into his high school, he was arrested and taken out of school in handcuffs for making what some teachers and police say was a fake bomb. Mind you that Ahmed himself had never claimed that it was anything other than a clock. Even when police (illegally, without his parents present) questioned him, he told them that it was just a clock, and it was the police that said it looked like a "movie bomb". See here for an official news story.

So is this a case of racism, esp. considering his name and religious affiliation with Islam? Or a case of schools' zero-tolerance policy going too far (like the kids that get suspended for pretending to shoot a leaf like a gun)? A combination of both?

[articx]

After reading that, I am reminded of the kid who bit a pop-tart into the shape of a gun, and the kid who wrote a fake story (as part of an assignment) about shooting his neighbor's dinosaur.

It sounds like the zero-tolerance policy going too far.

[linderlizzie]

I'm voting on the zero tolerance side. People are so hypersensitive to everything, they're not taking account of the actual circumstances involved.

I initially felt quite sorry for him, but since I have heard that the POTUS is inviting him to the White House and there have been other perks for him as well so he's doing all right. He looks to me like a survivor anyway. 

[lvstephanie]

I'm voting on the zero tolerance side. People are so hypersensitive to everything, they're not taking account of the actual circumstances involved.

I initially felt quite sorry for him, but since I have heard that the POTUS is inviting him to the White House and there have been other perks for him as well so he's doing all right. He looks to me like a survivor anyway. 

Yeah, this attention has given him some unique opportunities... As you mentioned, President Obama invited him to the White house, Zuckerberg invited him to visit Facebook headquarters, Twitter invited him to intern for them, Google opened up a space for him (and his clock) at Google's science fair, and the CEOs of AutoDesk and Box also invited him to their offices as well. He was also interviewed on MSNBC, and they brought in a surprise guest, an astrophysicist at MIT (his "dream college"), who said that he was exactly the type of student that MIT is looking for, saying that he'd make her ideal student. And of course the seemingly ubiquitous crowd funding as a form of support for a person thought to be wronged has also been started for Ahmed (and future STEM students) in the form of scholarship money; the crowd funding has already garnered over $10K with the hope that it will build to at least $100K to start the scholarship endowment.

BTW, he was cleared of legal charges yesterday, but was still suspended from his school. He is currently looking to attend a different school.

[tgreen20]

So true, hopefully this wasn't his plan so he could get into the white house. 

[hawkeye3210]

A suitcase clock isn't a simple digital clock. The teacher made the right move in getting it checked out. No reason to take chances if you any doubt to what it actually is.

[madeara]

Wow.  How sad.   This is a case of a zero tolerance policy gone overboard.

[lvstephanie]

A suitcase clock isn't a simple digital clock. The teacher made the right move in getting it checked out. No reason to take chances if you any doubt to what it actually is.

I agree that it was fine to be suspicious and get it checked out. But as soon as they found no detonator, no explosives, or even any circuitry that wasn't necessary for clock operation, they should have let the kid go. There was no reason to handcuff the kid either, unless it looked like he was resisting being escorted out of school by the police. And when he was being questioned by police, he should have been allowed to talk to his parents, and / or have a parent present during questioning (he's a minor child, after all). I'm also upset with his engineering teacher (the one that he had originally shown the clock to) in that the teacher didn't come to his defense by saying that Ahmed had already shown him the device, and that the device was nothing more than a clock (perhaps the English teacher wouldn't have been able to distinguish the differences between a clock and a bomb, but the engineering teacher should have easily been able to do so). Finally, once the device was found to be a clock and all of his responses to questioning by police and school staff corroborated this (that he had built the clock to show off to his teacher, and that he wasn't trying to make a hoax bomb), the school should have not punished him any further; the police were able to drop their charges, so the school should have done the same.

Had the story been that a kid brought the clock into school, the clock was confiscated by a teacher as being a suspicious device, Ahmed gets questioned, but then at the end of the day he was cleared of all charges, had his clock returned to him, and had no further punishment, I don't think there'd be such an outcry over the injustice of it all. So while I agree that it was fine for the school to check out the device and to question Ahmed about it, it is the aftermath of the situation (esp. being questioned by police without a parent or attorney present, as well as the continued suspension of him even after the investigation showed nothing wrong had happened) that I have a big problem with.

[hawkeye3210]

A suitcase clock isn't a simple digital clock. The teacher made the right move in getting it checked out. No reason to take chances if you any doubt to what it actually is.

I agree that it was fine to be suspicious and get it checked out. But as soon as they found no detonator, no explosives, or even any circuitry that wasn't necessary for clock operation, they should have let the kid go. There was no reason to handcuff the kid either, unless it looked like he was resisting being escorted out of school by the police. And when he was being questioned by police, he should have been allowed to talk to his parents, and / or have a parent present during questioning (he's a minor child, after all). I'm also upset with his engineering teacher (the one that he had originally shown the clock to) in that the teacher didn't come to his defense by saying that Ahmed had already shown him the device, and that the device was nothing more than a clock (perhaps the English teacher wouldn't have been able to distinguish the differences between a clock and a bomb, but the engineering teacher should have easily been able to do so). Finally, once the device was found to be a clock and all of his responses to questioning by police and school staff corroborated this (that he had built the clock to show off to his teacher, and that he wasn't trying to make a hoax bomb), the school should have not punished him any further; the police were able to drop their charges, so the school should have done the same.

Had the story been that a kid brought the clock into school, the clock was confiscated by a teacher as being a suspicious device, Ahmed gets questioned, but then at the end of the day he was cleared of all charges, had his clock returned to him, and had no further punishment, I don't think there'd be such an outcry over the injustice of it all. So while I agree that it was fine for the school to check out the device and to question Ahmed about it, it is the aftermath of the situation (esp. being questioned by police without a parent or attorney present, as well as the continued suspension of him even after the investigation showed nothing wrong had happened) that I have a big problem with.

The faux outrage would have been the same even if his suspension was wiped away. The narrative of "Islamaphobia" was set, and actual facts matter very little after that.

Should the school have dropped the suspension? I don't know. Without knowing any of his previous behavior, it's hard to say. You don't need to be charged with a crime to be in violation of a school rule.

[JediJohnnie]

I'm pretty sure this is a result of the "zero-tolerance policy " gone too far. No matter what race the kid was, it would've been dealt with the same way.

I don't think there's any excuse for taking the kid to the Police Station in cuffs. Seems like overkill,when a simple discussion in the principle's office with the police should've been sufficient.

[bowrunner]

It actually turned out that the clock did look like a bomb so the teacher and school can't be blamed.