MadameNoire Featured Video

Source: NBC Chicago

Source: NBC Chicago

The school to prison pipeline is real. Very real. So much so that a 6-year-old, little girl was handcuffed for taking candy from her teacher’s desk.

After Madisyn Moore, a student at Fernwood Elementary, in Chicago, took the candy, the school resource officer decided to teach her a lesson.

Almost an hour later, when her mother Marlena Wordlaw arrived at the school, she found her daughter handcuffed, sitting in a dark stairwell. In an interview with NBC Chicago, Wordlaw said she asked the resource officer why he had her daughter in cuffs. “He said, ‘because I’m trying to teach them to stop taking stuff that don’t belong to them.’”

Little Madisyn said the officer “snatched me out of my class. He made me get out in my handcuffs.” She told reporters, “They hurted.”

Wordlaw said that when her daughter was removed from the stairwell, after 50 minutes, she was crying.

The principal attempted to apologize for the incident but Wordlaw was not willing to receive it. “I don’t accept your apology ever. I’m more angry than anything because it’s my only daughter. I feel like anything could have happened to her. Somebody could have touched her. She’s in the dark under the stairs.”

She told reporters that she has plans to file a lawsuit.

It’s amazing how school resource officers are used these days and the attitudes with which they enter the classroom. For the life of me, I can’t understand why a teacher would need an officer to handle a child who stole candy from a desk.

Certainly, the little girl wasn’t right to take candy that didn’t belong to her. But as a teacher, you should be fully capable of not only disciplining a six-year-old, in your classroom, without outside help, especially for something as small and trivial as taking candy. Loss of recess and a stern lecture would have done the trick. These are consequences a six-year-old can process and understand. These are consequences that would  have been benefitting of her action.

Hell, Dylan Roof was given a burger when he was arrested.  And he killed nine people during a Bible study. This little girl took a piece of candy and was bound and locked away in the dark as if she’d done something outside of the realm of normal, childhood behavior. Having this child placed in handcuffs for a violation she didn’t even understand is not only lazy teaching and overzealous policing, it sends a very strong message to a very impressionable child about what people in authority think about her and how they can treat her unjustly.  Her mother is absolutely right to believe that an apology is not enough. At the very least, the teacher needs to be heavily monitored as she receives additional training on handling classroom conflict. And that resource officer needs to be suspended/fired. An officer who would handcuff a six year old isn’t too far off from a grown man slinging a teenaged girl’s body across a classroom for refusing to leave her seat.

You can watch the full interview with Madisyn and her mother in the video below.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/portableplayer/?cmsID=372636191&videoID=jVly553w2pYD&origin=nbcchicago.com&sec=news&subsec=local&width=600&height=360

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