News - Fulton County school officials

There’s nobody more idiotic than a public school official, right? Seems like they’re always making wrong-headed, heavy-handed, surreal, counter-intuitive decisions that fly in the face of all sense and reason. Except, of course, all those other times when they make sound, balanced, situation-appropriate decisions that we never hear about.

Fact is, running an elementary school, teaching junior high or overseeing student disciplinary hearings all hold numerous challenges that would doubtless test the wisdom of Solomon. We should applaud anyone with the drive, dedication and devotion to others that a career in education requires.

That said, whoever the unnamed Fulton school official is who decided to expel 14-year-old Rachel Boim because of a fictional account of a teacher’s murder she wrote in a personal journal is just the sort of apparatchik bonehead who gives our local school systems a bad name. He or she should be forced to write “I will try to acquire some common sense” 1,000 times on the keel of a moving battleship.

Actually, nobody emerges unscathed from this fiasco. Not the nosy twerp of a teacher who pored over Rachel’s journal after she asked him not to read it, then finked the honor student out to his superiors as a potential assassin. Not the thought-policing administrator who ordered her to be taken from class by armed guards and suspended until her disciplinary hearing. Not even the system chiefs who reversed her expulsion to save face, but made no move to dispense with the pernicious “zero tolerance” policy that continues to foster situations like this.

No one comes out looking good, that is, unless you count Rachel Boim, a Roswell High School freshman, who has been singled out as the kind of smart, creative, free-thinking student you might imagine school officials would want to have in class. Judging from this sad episode, however, you’d be persuaded to believe that what they really cherish are spiritless drones who would never dream of coloring outside the lines — someone like the aforementioned unnamed school official, perhaps.