In another example of school officials gone mad while enforcing
“zero-tolerance” policies toward students, a 12-year-old New York girl in Queens was hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk with a lime-green erasable marker.

Alexa Gonzales, a student at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, wrote across her desk: “I love my friends Abby and Faith.
Lex was here 2/1/10” along with a smiley face. She busied herself with the doodling while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework. The outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw had never been in trouble at school before, and could not foresee what was about to happen next.

Rather than having her erase the erasable message and perhaps give her a good scolding, school officials for some inexplicable reason decided a more heavy-handed approach was necessary. They called the police, and Alexa was led out of her class in handcuffs in front of all of her classmates and teachers, then escorted to the police precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours.

“They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn’t believe it,” Alexa
recalled to reporters. “I started crying, like, a lot. I made two little
doodles. …It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is
unnecessary.” The student with an otherwise stellar attendance
record adds, “I just thought I’d get a detention. I thought maybe I
would have to clean (the desk).”

“Even when we’re asked to make an arrest,” said police spokesman Paul Browne, “common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary.” Several media outlets reported that school officials were calling the arrest “a mistake,” but otherwise were hush-hush about the incident. “We’re looking at the facts,” said city education department spokesman David Cantor. “Based on what we’ve seen so far, this shouldn’t have happened.”

However, to call these types of incidents “mistakes” is being far
too generous towards school officials. These are not benign and
harmless little whoopsees…these are significant traumas for the
children who endure them; traumas that never should have happened. For an otherwise well-behaved child, having your hands cuffed behind your back and led out of school, tears gushing, in front of everyone in your social world would be a major trauma for any preadolescent girl.

“I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person,” Alexa says. Both the embarrassment and the fear experienced easily put this on par with any conventional incident of child abuse.

“She’s been throwing up,” said her Morn, 49-year-old Moraima
Camacho, an accountant who lives with her daughter in Kew
Gardens. The whole situation has been a nightmare.” Alexa ultimately missed 3 days of school because of her arrest, and says it was a challenge to catch up on her homework when she returned to school. She spent all three days sick and vomiting from the stress of it all.

This is not a mistake, this is child abuse, and the teacher and
school administrator involved in this action should have been
immediately fired. Not out of spite or even for the horrible things
they did to this poor girl, but because any teacher who needs police intervention to handle such a minor issue has no business being in a classroom. Period. Your average McDonald’s worker could have handled this situation with more tact, in which case these school officials need to be serving up fries while we find others who have at least a small amount of skill for managing children to take their place.

Alexa served her suspension from school and she and her morn
went to family court a week later, where Alexa was assigned 8
hours of community service, a book report, and an essay on what
she learned from the experience. “I definitely learned not to ever
draw on a desk,” says Alexa. Although in this case, it should have been her teacher, not the 12-year-old, making the court appearance. New York attorney Joe Rosenthal is representing Alexa in a lawsuit against police and school officials for violation of the child’s constitutional rights, so perhaps we’ll see these roles reversed and these adults in court after all.