Parents suing NY State school district over kid's referral to psychiatrist

As one commenter noted on this story:

So let me get this straight..

THE SCHOOL assigns the kids to write an essay on "what would a person do if he had 24hours to live? "That is a MORBID!!!! question/assignment. Psyche services for the TEACHER whose morbid enough to come up with this trend of thought.

So now the TEACHERS LEADs the kid down this MORBID path...he answers honestly just as morbid as the question is and he needs psyche services?

What a warped bunch of a- holes these educators are. No wonder our kids are nuts!!!

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I hope a whole lot of these so called educators get fired. Incompetents fools. Each and everyone of us sit in front of the boob tube and watch "movies." Did it ever occur to anyone out there that those violent scenes came out of someones morbid minds? That begs the question why hasn't the likes of Steven King/ these screen writers/ directors ever been psyche evaluated? How about Susan Lucci? why hasn't she been evaluated? for her to play role a totally psychotic dysfunctional Erica Kane is a day at the office.

POINT BEING: This kid sees SICK/DYSFUNCTIONAL Psychos all day long all over the place and NO ONE QUESTIONS it. So why is every body questioning him for having the same morbid imagination as any screen writer after some morbid teacher asked him to write an essay on a morbid topic... such as what would you do before you got snuffed out?

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Here is the news item as reported in the Times Herald Record

The parents of a teenager referred to Child Protective Services because educators believed he was suicidal are suing the Warwick Valley School District.

In a federal claim, Everett Cox III, a former Warwick school board member, and Nan Ping Peng allege school officials violated their due process rights and their son's privacy rights. They want the district to pay for a private school.

"There's a level of recklessness here," said the parents' Goshen lawyer, Michael Sussman. "A kid has the right to speak out in response to a school assignment without a fear of his family being destroyed."

Sussman has had a string of legal victories suing school districts over due process violations. But those have been over suspensions from school or sports teams. This latest case gets at a more complex issue: how far schools should go to ensure children who are talking or writing about violence are not a danger to themselves or others.

Sussman said educators should be able to discriminate between a real problem and a kid who's in tune with a violent popular culture, and let parents decide what's best for a student.

But Pam Atkins, director at the Psychological Counseling Center at SUNY New Paltz, said school counselors have a duty to be sensitive to students' writing about violent behavior, and always err on the side of caution.

"Parents are specialists in raising children," Atkins said. "They are not specialists in suicide and homicide. We like to think we know our kids but so often our worries and our feelings about children interfere with our ability to see the truth about what's going on."

Warwick school officials declined comment. Their call to CPS came near the end of a school year in which the student had been in a fight with another student, been suspended for drawing on a school wall and written at least two school assignments that included references to violent activity, including suicide.

At the school's insistence, the student was evaluated by a psychologist in February, after he wrote the first essay. In April, in response to an assignment about how he would live his last 24 hours, the student wrote about doing drugs, taking poison and shooting himself.

He submitted the assignment before the April 16, 2007, massacre at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., in which a disturbed student killed 33 people, including himself. After the attack, school officials called the Child Protective Services hotline and, according to the suit, said the student was homicidal and suicidal and his parents provided "a minimal degree of care to their son."

The CPS psychiatrist who evaluated the student recommended a follow-up examination and sent him home with his parents.