Runs away with online chum; mom sues school

Upstate New York: “The Honeoye Central School District failed to keep a teenage student off the Internet as her parents requested, and she ran away with an 18-year-old Syracuse man she met online, the girl’s mother claims in legal papers.” The 15-year-old used school computers to meet Michael Macbeth, three years her elder, on MySpace; […]

Upstate New York: “The Honeoye Central School District failed to keep a teenage student off the Internet as her parents requested, and she ran away with an 18-year-old Syracuse man she met online, the girl’s mother claims in legal papers.” The 15-year-old used school computers to meet Michael Macbeth, three years her elder, on MySpace; the Ontario County sheriff’s office later arrested Macbeth “on charges of endangering the welfare of a child after he picked up the girl at Honeoye Central High School.” Now her mother, Luann Waden of Bloomfield, has filed a notice of intent to sue, saying she had asked the school not to let her daughter use the Internet. (Gary Craig, “Mom plans to sue school over Web”, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, May 29).

5 Comments

  • I’m really tired of people subsituting legal redress for parenting. By the time your kid’s 18, if you haven’t done your job, you shouldn’t expect the already-spread-thin schools to do it for you. The same goes for all those people who seek to legislate what I can watch on TV “for the children!” Well, guess what? When I was a child, that wasn’t an issue, because, in my family, we weren’t allowed to watch TV, save the “Wonderful World Of Disney” on Saturday nights. What did we do the rest of the time? We read. I read about every single book in the Farmington Hills Public Library. At 12, I couldn’t tell you the names of The Three Stooges, but I knew who Raskolnikov was.

  • Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard. All doctors.

    And I turned out fine.

    (Well okay, some would quarrel with that).

  • It sounds like the parent WAS trying to be a parent. She did not want her child on the internet. The school allowed her child on the internet, despite the lack of consent. The school dropped the ball. She is not trying to control what other children can do. Also, the child was 15, not 18.

  • I have to disagree with you Amy. The schools are intruding into a student’s life outside school more and more these days. They are taking diciplinary actions for things that happen outside of the classroom. A few years ago my cousin’s daughter ran away from home and went to stay with a friend. She continued to go to school though, when my cousing found out that she was in school he went to the Principal’s office and said that he was there to take his daughter home. She said that she didn’t want to go with her father and the school prevented him from taking her. After that she stopped going to school. A few days later my cousin was fined because his daughter wasn’t in class. If the schools are going to unsurp the parent’s authority with their children then let the schools face the consequences.

  • Why is this on overlawyered? You expect schools to keep your children safe, and if they fail to, they should definitely bear the consequences. Otherwise, what’s their incentive to care?