Times, they are a changin’
Today I got an email from my girlfriend with a subject line identifying the generation gap. I figured it was the beginning of a joke, and I was too realize a little late how serious, yet how true that statement was. In the article she sent me from the Washington Post, it discussed how a student at a Fairfax County, VA school called the Chief Operating Officer for his school to debate the reason why he was in school when snow, freezing rain, and ice were falling from the sky. According to the article, Devraj S. Kori tried to phone Dean Tistadt at his office to ask why he was in school. When he didn’t get an answer, according to the Washington Post article, he tried a listed number and left a message. The below video created from the voicemail response that Candy Tistadt, Dean’s wife, left for Kori on his cell phone.
I have soooooooooo many problems with this, I don’t know where to start.
1) Dean Tistadt is a member of an elected board that oversees a number of schools. He may have been up at 4am and in the office at 6:30am, but it shouldn’t matter if the caller was a parent or a student, as an elected official, he works for the students. People tend to forget that somehow.
2) The students think the administration was wrong and the administration thinks that Kori was wrong. Although the students are angry, I imagine, less for being at school when the weather was semi-dangerous(I live in Bowie, MD on the other side of the district – the weather was not good last Thursday), but for someone displaying disregard for their safety. For Mrs. Tistdat it was an issue of privacy. Here was a student calling her at home. “Harassing” her. The Washington Post article makes it seem like he only called once, while the MSNBC article makes it sound like he called repeatedly. I don’t know which to believe, but I think if you have a public number and you’re a public figure, deal with getting phone calls.
3) Threatening people is stupid and doesn’t get you anywhere. Posting the audio on YouTube was smart. Kori was insulted and being 17 doesn’t mean people have the right to be rude. Being in high school also doesn’t give you the right to threaten someone because they kept you in school. This past Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – learn something from his example. You want to fight the power, sit down and stay there. Don’t raise a fist. You do that, they win.
So I don’t ramble on forever, I’m going to end with this – the spokesperson for Fairfax County Schools is an idiot. I will now quote the Washington Post article:
Kori explained his perspective in an e-mail yesterday to Fairfax County schools spokesman Paul Regnier said, also in an e-mail, that Kori’s decision to place the phone call to the Tistadts’ home was more likely the result of a “civility gap.”
“It’s really an issue of kids learning what is acceptable and not acceptable. Any call to a public servant’s house is harassment,” Regnier said in an interview.
Any call to a public servant’s house is harassment. Is this guy stupid? I’m asking honestly. If you are an elected official, which part of working for the public is hard? The moment they get the paycheck, forget swearing an oath, once they get paid – they work for the students. Heck, they probably campaigned using a statement similar to that. So stop bullshitting and just accept the fact that you were wrong. Privacy is a whole other issue and to be frank, privacy for the YouTube Generation is completely different from my own, and I’m not much older. Information is out there and Mrs. Tistdat fell on her face in front of the world. It happens. But you can’t blame a student for exercising his civil rights.
The rest of the dumbf**ks sending threatening emails and calling all the time…those are ok to punish. And next time, don’t say anything stupid on someone’s voicemail. It’ll get out there, but quick.
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