On Sept. 13, when the students were fighting, Anntionetta Rountree had received a message from her son that asked her to get him out of a situation he saw unfolding on social media.
Rountree said her son had relayed to her that group chats were full of messages indicating a fight was going to break out.
“My son did not get into it with those kids, but he ended up getting into it with another kid. That kid socked his phone out if his hand,” said Rountree. “The first incident he sent me a message to tell me, ‘Mom these kids are at it again.’ I was going to call the school and let the school know…He tried, the situation… he got into a fight that was not something he saw coming or something he planned.”
Her son will be facing an expulsion hearing and they will hear the school board’s decision by Sept. 24 2021.
“They’re talking about expelling him, he’s not going to have an opportunity to prove that he learned from that lesson,” said Rountree.
Rountree said when it comes to tensions among students the officials will listen and they will try to communicate.
“Now the reactive, that is passing the buck, ‘We don’t wanna deal with this, we’re just gonna send them to RES.’ Rather than decent conversation, I feel like we can talk about whatever is going on with these kids,” said Rountree. “All these kids are smart; all these kids have goals, dreams…However these are still boys growing up in a society that says we can’t turn the other cheek, and if someone comes over and says something bogus to me then I need to respond.”
Rountree said the reactive response of expulsion just contributes to the vicious cycle of rejection these kids face.
“Giving these kids something to do…I propose some sort of more active activity. Maybe there needs to be boxing, maybe there needs to be weightlifting, something affordable that these kids could push their aggression towards rather than fighting each other,” said Rountree.
Illinois Senator and Gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey echoed Rountree and told Cities the B-N community, state and nation needs to go back to what worked in the past.
“We try to push kids towards college a lot and I think if we get them busy working with their hands get vocational programs back in…Let’s face it we are hurting for plumbers, electricians, mechanics. I had home-economics when I was in school, I learned to cook and I learned to sew. Let’s get their minds active and working again, instead of all just book work,” said Bailey. “There’s a lot that can be done…a lot of rollbacks of these crazy policies that have been enacted over the last 10-20 years, a lot of it doesn’t make any sense.”
Rountree said her son refuses to go to counseling, he doesn’t want to see a counselor.
“There is something going on with the kids that needs to be talked about, we can’t just say say our kids are okay just because they seem okay. We can’t just look at them and say you know what it’ll be fine, because they are impacting our community,” said Rountree.
Rountree said all the fights throughout that Monday were planned fights, excluding the one with her son’s involvement.
“There’s these group chats that basically all the kids from District 87 are in, and they were going back and forth in these group chats. Initiating [the fights], instigating, antagonizing them. They say hurtful things, they need something else to do then sit on their phones and harass each other, because that’s what they’re all doing,” said Rountree.
Some friends of Bailey’s visited the Pullman Museum on Saturday, in Chicago.
“You know the Pullman train cars, they built the community in Harvey and there’s a museum commemorating that… You walk into that museum and the very first thing you see is a display on: ‘How to be an anarchist’ and it is directed to the children,” said Bailey. “I was appalled when I saw this. This is what’s going on, this is what the left actually wants.”
Rountree said she was shocked that the girls were jumping in on these guy fights.
“It’s not anything that I could imagine,” said Rountree. “I’m 43 and I was in high school a long time ago, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It’s not just District 87 its high schools all over the place, North Carolina they’ve had a lot of shootings. It’s happening everywhere we need to try to figure out, the kids just got back into a little piece of normalcy after the pandemic.”
Rountree said parents, the school and community really needs to be looking at other options…besides kicking kids out.
“It’s not just our kids, its kids all across the country that are going into the schools and using them as war zones. We can’t just kick them out of one school and send them to another, the problems are still there,” said Rountree.
Bailey said teachers are losing respect and that they’re losing authority. Bailey served as a school board member for nearly 20 years.
“The school administration when you sit and you buckle down and you’re being threatened constantly by the Governor, then we have a scenario of basically lawlessness kind of like our community. Our school systems and the discipline they are in needs to tighten up. I mean this is nonsense,” said Bailey.
Bailey said Full Armor Christian Academy, a private school that Cindy Bailey (wife of Darren Bailey) is Executive Director, there is still use corporal punishment with parental consent.
“When a young person is being disobedient then parents usually are called, but yeah there are paddlings that take place. It’s humiliatingly to children so once that happens guess what they don’t want to do it again. You know the Bible tells us, ‘you spare the rod you’re gonna lose the child, that’s biblical wisdom,'” said Bailey. “A lot of this stuff children today are misguided, misdirected, sometimes parents have forgotten and lost their role in life. It’s time to take this responsibility seriously, and rein our children, rein our youth, rein our next generation back in.”
“Remember what Ben Franklin told us, when he walked out of Independence Hall, ‘We’ve given you a Republic, if you can keep it.’ We are at that ‘if you can keep it’ stage. Why else would you tear down our history and our schools, why else would you take all that away? With the exception of wanting something different for tomorrow. These young people, you know they’re the catalyst to get there. It is very concerning. It’s not normal,” said Bailey.
