Ohio Woman Tased After Allegedly Ramming Cop Cars

I Am the Principal Who Reported an Eleven Year Old. It Became a Felony. I made the call. I want that at the top, before anything else, because there is a version of this article where I am a bystander describing a system, and that would be dishonest. I picked up the phone and I reported an eleven year old child, and eight months later he had been out of school for most of a year, his mother had spent money she did not have, and he had a case number. My name is Yolanda Bettencourt and I have been a middle school principal for nineteen years. Everybody calls me Yoli. Here is what he did. He typed a sentence into a shared document during a group assignment. It was one line, and it said, in the abbreviated way children type, that he was going to blow up the school tomorrow, followed by an abbreviation indicating laughter. That is the entire offense. One line, typed to make three classmates laugh, deleted by him about ninety seconds later. He was eleven. He had transferred in eight weeks earlier. He had no friends yet and he was, by every account including his own, trying to be funny in front of people he badly wanted to like him. Another student screenshotted it before he deleted it and showed a teacher, which is exactly what we have spent a decade telling students to do and which that student was completely right to do. Now let me explain what happened next, because most people assume there was a moment where an adult looked at this and made a judgment call. There was not. That is the whole point of this article. Our district has a mandatory reporting policy for any communicated threat of violence against a school. Mandatory means what it sounds like. It is not a guideline that a principal weighs against context. It says that when a threat is reported, I notify law enforcement. Not investigate first. Not assess first. Notify. I have thought about whether I could have handled it informally, and I want to be honest that yes, physically, I could have. I could have called his mother, brought him in, dealt with it as a discipline matter, and never made the call. If I had done that and something had happened, I would have been criminally exposed and professionally finished, and rightly so. And I want to tell you why that is not a hypothetical to me, because it is the reason I am not able to write a simple article about this. In 2013, at a different school, I had a report about a student who had said something in a hallway. It was vague. He was a kid with problems and I knew his family and I made a judgment call and I handled it in my office. Nothing happened. He is fine, he is an adult now, and he has a life. But for about three weeks afterward I could not sleep, because I understood that I had made a decision based on liking a child, and that liking a child is not a risk assessment. Every mandatory policy in American schools was written by somebody standing in the wreckage of a judgment call that went the other way. I know that. I believe in the policies. I helped write parts of ours. That is what makes this so hard to talk about honestly, and why most articles about it are worthless. So I called Deputy Wynn Talbert, our school resource officer, and I told him what had been reported, and I gave him the screenshot, and I also gave him three paragraphs of context. I wrote down that the student was eleven, newly transferred, socially isolated, that the statement was made in a joking register to peers, that he deleted it himself, that he had no disciplinary history, and that in my professional judgment there was no genuine intent. I want you to hold onto the fact that I wrote all of that down on the first day, because it is going to matter later and not in the way you would hope. Wynn Talbert is a decent officer and he did not want this either. He told me so in my office with the door closed. And then he did what his policy required, which was to document and refer, because a communicated threat against a school is not something an SRO closes out at his own discretion. The referral went to the prosecutor's office. Here is the legal piece, and it is worth understanding because it applies in some form in most of the country now. After a series of mass shootings at schools, states across the country passed statutes criminalizing threats of mass violence against school property. These laws are frequently written as felonies. They usually do not require any capability to carry out the threat, and they generally do not require intent to actually do it. What they require is that a threat was communicated. That is the element. Whether the person could have done it, or meant it, is often legally beside the point, because the harm the statute is aimed at is the disruption and terror caused by the threat itself. Those laws exist for real reasons. A school that has to evacuate, a district that has to sweep a building, a thousand families that spend a day terrified. That is genuine harm and it happens whether or not the person typing was serious. The laws were also, almost without exception, written with a mental image of a seventeen year old. Not a fifth grader who had been at the school for eight weeks. The prosecutor's office had a policy of its own, and I learned about it during this case. Their stated position was that all credible-on-their-face school threats would be charged, without exception, because exceptions create the perception that some threats are tolerated. ADA Colleen Ashcroft, who handled it, explained this to me directly and she was not being cruel about it. She told me that the moment her office starts deciding which threats are jokes, every defense attorney in the county has a new argument and every kid learns where the line is. I understood the logic. I still think it produced an insane result. So an eleven year old was charged with a felony for a sentence he typed and deleted in ninety seconds. My three paragraphs of context went into the file. They were read. They changed nothing about the charging decision, because the charging decision was governed by a policy that did not have a field for social isolation or for the word joking. That is the thing I most want people to take from this. There was no villain. I did my job, Wynn did his job, Ashcroft did her job, and the district policy and the state statute and the office charging policy all functioned exactly as designed. The design produces this outcome. Nobody chose it and everybody enacted it. Now what it actually cost. Emerson was removed from school pending the outcome. That is standard and it is defensible on its face, because you cannot leave a student in a building while a threat allegation involving that building is unresolved. He was out for eight months. Eight months of a child's life, at eleven, which is a developmental year you do not get back. He did some packet work and some online modules and effectively lost a school year. His mother Sharee worked in home health and had to reduce her hours because an eleven year old cannot be alone all day, and that reduction was permanent because her position got filled. They got a public defender initially and then, on advice, hired a private attorney for the juvenile proceeding, which cost them a number I know because Sharee told me and which I am not going to print. The case ultimately resolved through a diversion program. He completed it. He did counseling, community service, and a class, and at the end of it the charge was dismissed and the record is eligible to be sealed. That is the good outcome. I need to say that clearly. In the range of possible endings, that is close to the best one available. It still took eight months, cost a family more than they had, and removed a child from school for a year over one deleted sentence. And here is the part nobody warned any of us about. The arrest was reported locally. Eleven year old charged in school threat. His name was not published because he is a juvenile, but this is a town of nine thousand people and everybody knew within a day. Sharee had to change churches. I am not going to elaborate on that. Emerson came back the following year. He is fifteen now and he is doing fine, and I mean that genuinely and not as a tidy ending. He is a quiet kid who is good at building things and who has a small solid group of friends and who has never been in a single moment of trouble since. He also does not talk in class. Not once, in four years, has that child volunteered a comment in a classroom. I have watched him do it and I know exactly what I am looking at. Now, what I have done about it, because complaining about a system I helped run is not worth anybody's time. I could not change the state statute and I could not change the prosecutor's charging policy. What I could change was the ten hours between a screenshot arriving on a teacher's desk and a referral leaving my building. We built a same day threat assessment step. It does not replace the mandatory report and it does not delay it. What it does is ensure that a structured, documented assessment by a trained team, including a school psychologist, is completed and attached to the referral rather than following it three weeks later. It uses an established behavioral threat assessment framework, the kind that distinguishes between a student who has made a threat and a student who poses one, which is a distinction that exists in the professional literature and did not exist anywhere in our paperwork. It has not stopped a single referral. It was never meant to. What it has done is put a professional assessment in front of a prosecutor at the moment of the charging decision rather than months later, and in two cases since, that assessment is the reason a matter was routed to diversion at the outset instead of after a child had already lost half a year. Two cases. That is the whole result of four years of my effort. I offer it as an honest accounting of what one principal can move. Here is what I would say to parents, and it is the most useful part of this. Talk to your children about this specific thing, explicitly, before it happens. Not a general lecture about jokes. A concrete conversation that says that written statements about violence at a school are treated as crimes in this state, that it does not matter that you are joking, and that there is no version where an adult decides you were obviously kidding and drops it. Children genuinely do not know this. They live in a culture of hyperbolic online speech where everyone says extreme things constantly, and they have no idea that the school context converts that speech into something with a statute attached. Say the words. It takes four minutes and it is the single highest value conversation you can have. And if it does happen to your child, get an attorney before your child speaks to anyone. Not after the first interview. Before. I am a school administrator telling you this and I am aware of how it sounds. I am telling you anyway, because I have watched parents allow an interview out of a sincere belief that cooperation would make it go away, and it does not make it go away, and the statements made in that room become part of the file. Ask about diversion eligibility on day one rather than month three. In many jurisdictions it is available early and nobody volunteers that information. Last thing. I still believe in mandatory reporting. If a report comes to me tomorrow about a student I have known for six years and adore, I will make the call, and I will make it in the first ten minutes. I also believe that a system that cannot tell the difference between a seventeen year old with a plan and an eleven year old with an audience is not protecting anybody, it is just processing everybody the same way and calling that fairness. Both of those are true. I have carried them together for four years and they have not gotten any lighter. The footage of that arrest is below. He was eleven years old and he weighed about seventy pounds and he had deleted the sentence before anybody found it.   Full video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVEhvS1BBFo&t=733s