Educational bureaucracy meets student reality

I really thought we'd already reached the nadir of political correctness in the schools, but I was wrong:

Is American public education a form of child abuse? A week ago, The Washington Post's Brigid Schulte reported on a student named Randy Castro who attends school in Woodbridge, Virginia. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police.

Randy Castro is in the First Grade. But, at the ripe old age of six, he's been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He's guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his schooldays — and maybe beyond. Maybe it'll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year old Randy Castro will apply for a job and at his prospective employer's computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he'll be able to keep it hushed up until he's 57 and runs for Governor of Virginia and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed. But that's what he is now: Randy Castro, sex offender. The title of the incident report spells out his crime: "Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive." The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the First Grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.

Randy Castro was not apprehended until he was six, so who knows how long his reign of sexual terror lasted? Sixteen months ago, a school official in Texas accused a four-year old of sexual harassment after the boy was observed pressing his face into the breasts of a teacher's aide when he hugged her before boarding the school bus. Fortunately, the school took decisive action and suspended the sick freak. By the way, is that the first recorded use in the history of the English language of the phrase "accused a four-year old of sexual harassment"? Well, it won't be the last: In the state of Maryland last year, 16 kindergartners were suspended for sexual harassment, as were three pre-schoolers. School officials declined to comment to The Washington Post on Master Castro's case on the grounds of student confidentiality. However, they did say that the decision to call the cops was "the result of a misunderstanding". And it's not like he was Tasered or anything.

Words fail me.