Now for one of our regular features, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and OutragesOur Clown this time out is the administration of Cape Elizabeth High School in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Sophomore Aela Mansmann felt that administrators hadn’t been doing enough to respond to allegations of sexual assault in the school, so on September 16 she wrote “There’s a rapist in our school and you know who it is” on yellow sticky notes and posted them on bathroom walls in the school.
No names were used and there was no identifying information.
She said she hoped to spark more of a conversation of sexual assault incidents. She may not have gotten that, but she did get a reaction.
Initially, school officials had assured her mother that there would be no punishment. But after the local paper ran a story on the students' concerns, Mansmann was pulled out of class and told she was being suspended for three days - for bullying. Bullying, that is, via a note containing no way to tell who it was aimed at - or even if it was aimed at a specific person. Bullying an unnamed rapist with a sticky note.
On October 7, dozens of students walked out of class to protest her punishment, along with that of two other students who were also suspended for helping to post the sticky notes.
The school, needless to say, whined that the sticky notes were not the proper way for students to voice their frustrations. Of course. They should have gone to the administration and then silently accepted being ignored.
Suspending students for "bullying" an unidentified someone - or someones - because you were embarrassed by a newspaper article about sexual assault on your watch? Practically defines "Clown."
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