Tough customer for coppers.

Six-Year-Old Handcuffed — Why weren’t the parents called to take care of this. Welcome to the US School/Prison system.

Kathy Franklin says she wants to get her daughters back in school. But after her 6-year-old was handcuffed and then sent to a mental health facility, she no longer feels her children are safe at Parkway Elementary.

“These people are going to the extreme,” Franklin said. “She is so tiny. They didn’t have to use force on her.”

On Tuesday, after another disruption, the girl was put under a law enforcement involuntary Baker Act and taken to a mental health facility. Franklin says the latest events have traumatized her daughter. She is afraid of law enforcement and school, she said.





  1. bob says:

    In the title, your six turned into a caret. Darn shift keys.

  2. Thinker says:

    Oy! Why are you using law enforcement to handle this?? Its like using a hammer to pound in a screw. I’m thinking the teachers union is pushing this off to Law Enforcement. It doesn’t make sense.

  3. Thinker says:

    That being said it does seem the kids a handful, but aren’t most of them??

  4. bill says:

    I bet the kid now has a ‘record’.

    Good luck on getting on an airplane.

    Or a job
    Or a passport.

  5. SRG says:

    The report said Franklin had been contacted “several times” by the school and once by the deputy about Haley’s behavior problems. However, the parents have not showed up for meetings.

    “These people are going to the extreme,” Franklin said.

    If she didn’t bother to talk to the teachers, or observe her child at school, how does she determine what’s “extreme” ?

  6. Breetai says:

    There are ways that works… but the kid has to be two digits.

  7. John E. Quantum says:

    Handcuffs? They should have used a tazer. That would reallly teach the kid a lesson.

  8. LibertyLover says:

    Quit your griping. Those are my tax dollars paying for her discipline and education and that’s the way I want them spent.

    If you don’t like it move to Somalia.

  9. Skeptic says:

    I would have called Super Nanny.

  10. bobbo, libertarianism fails when it becomes dogma says:

    Yea, hard cases make for hard results.

    Most reminds me of episodes of “The Dog Whisperer” in that the kid shows the results of her training and what she needs is just a little bit of individual attention.

    Doesn’t look like she will get it though. The system rolls over a lot of people when the parents are too incompetent to provide direction.

  11. rob says:

    This is perfectly reasonable. If my kid’s classmate was acting like that I would want the child removed from the class. If the kid was that violent it’s better for the teacher and the school to let law enforcement do it rather than risk some sort of lawsuit. This is just an example of the “my child is a perfect angel” syndrome.

  12. denacron says:

    The next step will be the parents offering the school officials bribes to leave their children alone.

    Brute force is the approach to ‘getting things done’ in the small minded. Civility is declining fast. I imagine the child could actually be a horrid spoiled brat bred by an equally horrid community. The brute force approach is most likely the daily process in that area.

    Cuffing a six year old is very stupid. It seems likely to be coming to a neighborhood near you. No child left behind is change you can believe in, you can take that to the bank, read my lips.

  13. bobbo, libertarianism fails when it becomes dogma says:

    I’m thinking “the main” motivation here is that school officials were not getting any cooperation from the parents with a child who was continuing to act out.

    What to do?

    Mandatory child counseling if not family counseling/review seems only appropriate and maybe the only if not easiest way to get this result is by the Police intervening. There is a small list of people who can put an involuntary psychiatric hold on people and police are in that group. School nurses should be allowed too, but then they don’t have access to transportation and what not.

    So==I don’t like this result, but I can’t think of a better one.

    Reality bites.

  14. joe says:

    this is the result of the bullshit parents lawsuits have spawned. So the topic title sounds terrible, but parents have successfully sued school districts for teachers “physically restraining” kids who act out or harm themselves or other’s Rather then have the teachers deal with the situation and possibly get sued, have the cops deal with it. I heard horror stories from public school teachers. One teacher have an autistic child in her class, when he would act out, the teacher was told to remove all of the other kids from her class and wait outside till he calmed down. well, the kid would just go outside with the rest of the class and act out there.

    to quote the principal Carl Moss from King of the hill

    “If I show a little tolerance, it wouldn’t be zero tolerance then”

  15. Dr Dodd says:

    There once has a magical cure for children that misbehaved and it didn’t require handcuffs.

    It was called, the woodshed.

    They say using one in a responsible manner quickly transforms the brat into an attentive child.

  16. dusanmal says:

    Two fundamental reason why this have happened:
    1) BS PC inept parents who can’t raise 6yrs old who behaves.
    2) Lawsuit society where everyone’s hands are tied to act properly.

    Good smacking at home and school and this brat wouldn’t waste our public safety time, money and energy.

  17. Angel H. Wong says:

    If you don’t have the balls to spank your kids when they’re throwing a tantrum…

  18. roastedpeanuts says:

    They should have waterboarded the kid. It works well apparently.

  19. bobbo, knuckle dragging apes know better than we says:

    “If you don’t have the knowledge/education/time/love/upbringing yourself to pick up your child and love them when they are misbehaving……..”

  20. Killer Duck says:

    If you read the article you realize the reason the girl acts out is because the other kids don’t like her. Considering the moronitiy (new word) of the school administration, I am going to bet there are plenty of kids that are being bullied or under-performing in class.

    And #17 I agree…parents are MIA here. On the other hand, 6 is too young to have police involved. Maybe the police should be taking the parents to the mental eval, not the kid.

  21. Steve S says:

    I still have scars (both emotional and physical) from when teachers would pinch me or hit me across the knuckles with a ruler. At least I didn’t get hit with the paddle which was hanging on the principal’s wall. Repeat offenses were relatively rare from that punishment. My how times have changed (maybe not for the better).

  22. LDA says:

    She’s 6. I guess it is not a surprise that some who remember being assaulted as children think violence is the only solution (bring back the scarring!?). Go figure.

    I guess it worked to make you scared enough not to talk back, but it didn’t make you compassionate enough not to advocate violence against a 6 year old girl.

    Solution, remove her from school (if she is really a threat to others) and offer support to the parents. If they do not take up the offer that is up to them. Also, address any possible catalyst (like being bullied) before lumping all the blame on the victim turned perpetrator.

    Maybe if we valued schools as much as all the other worthless crap in society (e.g. Wall Street?) they would have the time and resources to be the kind of places suitable to offload the education (read raising) of our children, and maybe then there would be (virtually) no need to call the cops on 6 year old girls.

    Nah, too much trouble, just beat ’em.

  23. Greg Allen says:

    She does seem like a candidate for a mental health evaluation. Violently out-of-control for an hour?

    That seem like a mental illness, rather than just a behavioural problem.

    I know the parents try to make the school look like villains but sending the girl for mental health evaluation is probably the right thing.

    Worse, is that the parents don’t seem to understand the severity of the problem — if they did they surely would have come to meetings about their daughter.

    Still, the handcuffs seem like too much. How much of a danger was she really to staff and other children?

  24. Greg Allen says:

    >> Dr Dodd said, on February 22nd, 2010 at 2:38 pm
    >> It was called, the woodshed.
    >> They say using one in a responsible manner quickly transforms the brat into an attentive child.

    I have never seen any research that bears this out.

    If you have a link to a study which proves that hitting a child solves severe behavioural problems, I’d read it.

  25. noname says:

    When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    That’s about sums up America. It’s all about power, and this tiny kid has none.

  26. muddauber says:

    I’d like to see restrain some wild kid while managing 25 other excited children. It’s not as simple as a power issue, but our legalistic society. We can’t ignore certain actions, and we are limited on how we can respond. We can no longer handle things informally, but follow the
    legal procedure set down by the courts. The courts rule, not common sense.

  27. muddauber says:

    I’d like to see restrain some wild kid while managing 25 other excited children. It’s not as simple as a power issue, but our legalistic society. We can’t ignore certain actions, and we are limited on how we can respond. We can no longer handle things informally, but follow the
    legal procedure set down by the courts. The courts rule, not common sense.

    She fought the law, and the law won. Same old story, just a younger version.

  28. Dr Dodd says:

    #24-Greg Allen

    Children are constantly testing boundaries. No one said beat a child, but a little pop on rump helps to set clear boundaries.

    Make no mistake, few if any children appreciate the effort at the time. It’s later in life they understand and will love their parents instead of despise them for not teaching the difference between right from wrong.

    Society will certainly appreciate it.

  29. deowll says:

    Don’t have a clue about the particulars of this case.

    I do know that some spoiled rotten brats and people with major behavioral problems are nobody anybody sane wants to be around. I once dealt with a class that had two such people in it and it was a very bad year even though the classes rotated. Some of these people are a serious threat to the safety and well being of those around them and even if yours aren’t you aren’t going to get much teaching done because you end up spending all your time dealing with them.

    If you haven’t personally dealt with somebody like this you don’t have a clue. If you have you wonder how the parents avoid having a nervous break down if they do that is.

    On the other hand you do have the occasional dream class when you can’t wait to get up in the morning and go to work because teaching is the best job in the Universe.

  30. JScott says:

    #4 You don’t get a “record” unless you are convicted of something.

    Essentially, I am unsympathetic to parental crocodile tears about some spoiled brat who has had no boundaries set by parents. If a school official puts their hands on the brat, they are arrested themselves and likely suspended. Even when they call police so that trained professionals can deal with it at no risk to the school, the whiny parents are still not happy.

    People who refuse to exercise control over their children and teach them basic standards of public behavior should be held responsible to pay the costs that public institutions are subjected to as a result of having to act as parents by proxy.


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