The Rumor Mill

Imagine my surprise when reading the police blotter in last week's "Grosse Pointe News" detailing a serious incident at South. The short story spoke of a supposed threat made by a student that he would return "with a gun and his homeys" following a fight with another student. That was the rumor mill, and frankly I don't know how that even reached the paper.

Here is the skinny on what happened...one student approached another in the cafeteria during lunch. A brief altercation took place, but punches were not even thrown. On the way out of the building, the first student would not stop when asked by school personnel. Student number two thought he heard from others that the first student said something similar to the quote cited in the paper. However, when administrators questioned students that were in the vicinity, we could never get anyone to validate anything close to the alleged threat.

In addition, when we met with the student and parent that supposedly made the threat, he reiterated that no threat was made. In addition, the parent never tried to hide the whereabouts of her son, as stated in the police blotter. On the contrary, the parent was most cooperative with school personnel.

This is another example of sensationalism that often reaches the newspaper and the media in general. It happens so often that I normally refrain from responding, however, in this case the information was unusually erroneous.

Just as we teach our students to critically read information they find on the Internet, I hope our parents read and listen with a certain skepticism information they encounter about our schools.