I thought it was a rare event, and one, that upon others hearing of it, would not be repeated.

It happened in the 1980s, and as it was a while ago, a blip on my radar, and my life has been very involved and busy since, I can only recall the main details.

A teacher in a town in which I lived, endeavoring to reduce school yard injuries among her elementary school students, had bought a supply of Nerf Balls of various sizes so that in any game that called for students to throw a ball to or at each other, injuries could be avoided.

During recess one day, while she was involved in a game with some of her students, the teacher threw a Nerf Ball to a student who was slow to act, and the ball bounced off his forehead. Surprisingly the child fell to the ground and died a little while later.

As it turned out, the student had a small clot  in his brain just behind his forehead that just needed a small jostling to have it rupture, something that could be as simple as the kid swatting a mosquito on his forehead, or in this case having a Nerf Ball bounce off it.

There is no money to be had from an accidental death, so the family charged the teacher with the murder of their son because she had thrown the Nerf Ball that had ruptured the clot. It could have happened at any time, in any place, and because of any innocent action by any one, including the child himself, but the sequence here was clear. The teacher had thrown the Nerf Ball; it hit the kid’s forehead; the kid died because of it. So, the teacher was responsible.

Regardless of the final outcome and the fact that no one could have prevented the death because no one had been aware of the undetected condition as the child had never exhibited any evidence of the time bomb in his head so the need for prevention or protections was not known to exist may have reduced the charge, the initial shock of the death from an innocent act, and the psychological toll on the teacher when that was compounded by a legal proceedings had to be immense.

One can only imagine the toll on a child if it had been a child who threw the Nerf Ball and the parents had acted the same.

Some 10 year olds were recently playing Dodgeball during recess at school. Yes, Dodgeball, that game where each team throws balls at the other. That game anyone reading this has probably played with varying degrees of enjoyment. After the game one student was given a one-day suspension for allegedly hitting a classmate in the face with a ball during the game because the child reportedly sustained a concussion.

As odd as this was, being punished for doing something that is part of the game, things took a further turn into oddness when that kid’s mother received a phone call from the local juvenile court  months after the Dodgeball game explaining that her son would be charged with aggravated assault  because the concussed child’s mother said her son had a previous medical condition that made him susceptible to head injuries. She also complained that her son had sustained facial tissue damage to his face, a black eye, and a bruised nose.  And, she contended, seemingly ignoring that balls are thrown in Dodgeball on purpose, it was no accident.

The accusing mother also admitted that her son had already experienced similar incidents while engaging in physical activities at school.
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She had taken no actions, made no recommendations as to what activities teachers should prevent her son from getting involved in, nor made any requests that would have ruled out any activities that might injure her son, but had “tried not to let it get to this point”.

If the parent was concerned about her child’s propensity for injury and if the student had a history of injuries, the child should have been told by his mother not to play any games that could cause injuries and the school should have been told not to allow him to. If the child disobeyed the parents or the school ignored any cautions, blame could be properly placed. But as it is, some kid is being forced to bear the blame.

There are two victims here.

One is the kid who now faces a court hearing, the resulting publicity and unwanted attention, some type of punishment, and a negative reputation with peers and his school that could haunt him during his school years and after that could erase the person he could have been in favor of the person this makes him become.

The other is a kid who will spend his school years known as the kid who needs his parents to protect him, and with whom they can’t play because his parents might go after them if he gets hurt.

The kid shouldn’t have been playing a risky game in the first place.

If a child has a medical condition and as the parent fail to alert the school and teachers about it, then it’s their fault if something happens, not some kid who was just playing a game as it is supposed to be played.

And there may be  more to the story.

Aggravated assault seems to be a little too harsh a charge, but that is what the Wayne County Michigan’s Juvenile Prosecuting Unit went with according to assistant prosecuting attorney Maria Miller.

A detail that cannot be overlooked, especially because of the nature of the game and that this is not the only time some kid got hit in the face during a game of Dodgeball, is that a White kid was hit by a ball thrown by a Black Kid.

In my years of teaching in different public schools in three states, I, and other teachers, saw a certain obvious degree of inequality in the severity of punishment given between students of color and the white students for the same offense, but were usually ignored when we pointed this out to administrators.

But now a 2018 report by the watchdog Government Accountability Group found this to be true. Black students in grades K-12 are far more likely to be disciplined at school from suspension to referral to law enforcement than kids of other races, and a Brookings Institution study confirmed this and it was not limited to those states known for racial disparity.