Hey Assholes

So a TV news reporter gets wind of some disturbing allegations about abusive discipline in an elementary school. She goes and talks to parents, and then recites what they told her:

Parents in a Connecticut suburb are outraged over disturbing disciplinary actions at a local elementary school.

They claim students are being locked in unsupervised “scream rooms,” where some children have harmed themselves, reports CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez...

“My daughter is telling me that there’s kids being taken out in ambulances, by stretcher,” parent Sean Archer told CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez on Wednesday...

“From what I heard it’s more traumatizing for the child than it was as a help,” parent Jeff Daniels said. “Kids were hitting their heads on the concrete wall. Kids were urinating in the room.”

Then the reporter says that school officials deny the allegations but promise to investigate -- it didn't happen, but we'll find out if it happened -- and it's back to Larry in the studio.

But check this shit out, CBS 2's Hazel Sanchez: When someone calls for an ambulance, there's a record of the call. You can take three minutes to find a supervisor at the local 911 call center and ask if they've had any requests for emergency medical services at the school. You can call the local fire department, the local ambulance companies, the local hospital. You can check the fucking claims and see if there's evidence to support them, rather than just gathering them up with your ears and emptying them out with your mouth. And you can do all of that in about twenty minutes, if you know how to 1.) Google, and 2.) Press the little buttons on a phone and make word-sounds into the end with the talk-thingie. You can seek evidence. Evidence. (Long pause.) No, Hazel, evidence. E-V-I-D- you know what, never mind.

My bet is that if the school was calling for ambulances to take children out of the school on stretchers, at some point the police would have also diddled on over and wondered what was going on. The remarkable thing about 911 calls is that you usually reach a minimum of two public agencies on the other end, and one of them has the guns and the handcuffs and stuff.

But then take someone who can't discover which way is up when someone says that Oh, they're always dragging bloodied children out of that grade school in ambulances, and assign that person to report on, I don't know, school district pension costs. Or the federal budget. Or a war.

And there you have it.