That guy is done...he's lost his job, and the parents will probably sue.

Janet

EAGAN, Minn. (AP) - An elementary school principal could be disciplined for allegedly forcing a 6-year-old boy to unclog a toilet with his bare hands. The principal of Rahn Elementary has been on paid leave since mid-December while the school district investigated a complaint from the boy's parents. The school board proposed disciplinary action on Thursday. The nature of the discipline wasn't made public.

The boy's parents claim their son told them the principal made him clean out a toilet bowl that the boy had accidentally clogged on Dec. 12. The boy told his parents he wiped himself with paper towels, instead of toilet paper, causing the clog.

The principal declined to respond to the claims Thursday. He also didn't say what disciplinary action was proposed and whether he'd appeal.

Had it been my child, that guy would find his head in the toilet...

Dave

Why didn't the bus driver check? The driver is responsible for all who ride the bus.....

Rebecca

FORT WORTH, Texas, Feb. 11 (UPI) -- The mother of a 13-year-old boy has accused a school bus driver of abandoning her child in an unfamiliar area of Fort Worth, Texas.

The enraged mother, whose identity was not reported, alleged in a police report that her young son's safety was endangered when he was forced to walk miles in an unfamiliar area during cold weather, the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram said Wednesday.

The woman alleged that the unidentified bus driver forced her son, a student at Prairie Vista Middle School, to exit the bus after learning the child was not an assigned bus passenger.

The child had apparently attempted to take the bus to school Monday after spending the night at a friend's home, the mother said.

An official with the Petermann Southwest transportation company, which is responsible for all school district transportation, told the Star-Telegram the incident is under investigation.

"Our policy is we don't strand kids," said Kirk Wilkie, Petermann senior vice president of operations. "We want to transport them and then work out the issues. In this instance, there was incorrect instructions given to that driver by the dispatch department, and we're in the process of investigating how it happened."

DALLAS, Feb. 12 (UPI) -- A mother in Dallas abandoned her three children with a homeless woman, a police report alleges.

The Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram said Thursday that, according to a police report, the unidentified mother left the three children with the homeless woman at a Dallas bus stop this week.

The mother, who is being sought by police, asked the homeless individual to watch her children for an hour. But the mother never returned Monday, leading the homeless woman to contact authorities.

The ages of the three children and the identity of the homeless woman were not reported.

The police report said all three children are now in the custody of Child Protective Services, the Star-Telegram reported

It seems the girl convicted was involved in another beating....thi s one with her mother.

Mercades Nichols, a Polk County teenager who recently pleaded guilty in the video-taped beating of a high school girl, was involved in another altercation Saturday, this time involving her mother.

Authorities said Nichols' mother, 35-year-old Christina Garcia, was the primary aggressor in the incident. Witnesses told police she grabbed Nichols by the hair, kicked her several times and spit on her. The girl's grandmother intervened during the first altercation but needed the help of two others to break up the second fight.

The mother doesn't live with the daughter, but was charged with two counts of battery, domestic violence. She bonded out of jail Sunday afternoon. The home, where Mercades Nichols lives, belongs to her grandmother Mary Nichols.
Witnesses said Garcia and Mercades Nichols got into two altercations on Saturday afternoon, prompting Garcia to leave the home where her daughter lives and call law enforcement. Before she left the home, Garcia asked that all the phones be removed from the house so her daughter could not call law enforcement. Authorities said Garcia was afraid her daughter would try to place her under the Baker Act, which allows for emergency or involuntary commitment for mental health reasons.

When police got there, witnesses said Garcia was the primary aggressor in Saturday's fights. Nichols told deputies that she had no intention of calling law enforecment to report the incidents because her mother was dealing with numerous stressors. Nichols did not need medical attention, authorities said.

Meanwhile, the daughter is to be sentenced March 6 for her part in the video beating.

Beth

Like mother, like daughter. What did anyone expect?

Eileen

One girl is dead and another in the hospital after medics responded to a 911 call at a barracks in Fort Lewis Sunday morning.

Fort Lewis Emergency Response personnel got a call at about 3:30am Sunday morning.

When medics arrived, they found one of the females dead at the scene. Another female was transported to Madigan Army Medical Center with undisclosed injuries. She is currently in stable condition.

It is still unknown what the circumstances were when medics found the girls. The Fort Lewis Criminal Investigation Division is investigating the cause of death.

Identities have not been released due to the age of the victims.

In a press release sent to media Monday afternoon, it says, "Fort Lewis extends its heartfelt condolences to the family members of the deceased. Our thoughts and prayers are also with the family of the young lady who is receiving medical care."

A Fort Lewis soldier who was ``allegedly acquainted with the two girls'' has been questioned, but no arrests have been made, Piek said.

The Army didn't release information about the incident until Monday because it took place during a holiday weekend and officials needed to notify the teens' families, the spokesman said.

Keith

An update on the judges jailing kids for money....CNN is now interviewing a few, and they've agreed to allow their names and stories to be told.

Janet

(CNN) -- At a friend's sleepover more than a year ago, 14-year-old Phillip Swartley pocketed change from unlocked vehicles in the neighborhood to buy chips and soft drinks. The cops caught him.

There was no need for an attorney, said Phillip's mother, Amy Swartley, who thought at most, the judge would slap her son with a fine or community service.

But she was shocked to find her eighth-grader handcuffed and shackled in the courtroom and sentenced to a youth detention center. Then, he was shipped to a boarding school for troubled teens for nine months.

"Yes, my son made a mistake, but I didn't think he was going to be taken away from me," said Swartley, a 41-year-old single mother raising two boys in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

CNN does not usually identify minors accused of crimes. But Swartley and others agreed to be named to bring public attention to the issue.

As scandals from Wall Street to Washington roil the public trust, the justice system in Luzerne County, in the heart of Pennsylvania's struggling coal country, has also fallen prey to corruption. The county has been rocked by a kickback scandal involving two elected judges who essentially jailed kids for cash. Many of the children had appeared before judges without a lawyer.

The nonprofit Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia said Phillip is one of at least 5,000 children over the past five years who appeared before former Luzerne County President Judge Mark Ciavarella.

Ciavarella pleaded guilty earlier this month to federal criminal charges of fraud and other tax charges, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Former Luzerne County Senior Judge Michael Conahan also pleaded guilty to the same charges. The two secretly received more than $2.6 million, prosecutors said.

The judges have been disbarred and have resigned from their elected positions. They agreed to serve 87 months in prison under their plea deals. Ciavarella and Conahan did not return calls, and their attorneys told CNN that they have no comment.

Ciavarella, 58, along with Conahan, 56, corruptly and fraudulently "created the potential for an increased number of juvenile offenders to be sent to juvenile detention facilities," federal court documents alleged. Children would be placed in private detention centers, under contract with the court, to increase the head count. In exchange, the two judges would receive kickbacks.

The Juvenile Law Center said it plans to file a class-action lawsuit this week representing what they say are victims of corruption. Juvenile Law Center attorneys cite a few examples of harsh penalties Judge Ciavarella meted out for relatively petty offenses:


Ciavarvella sent 15-year-old Hillary Transue to a wilderness camp for mocking an assistant principal on a MySpace page.


He whisked 13-year-old Shane Bly, who was accused of trespassing in a vacant building, from his parents and confined him in a boot camp for two weekends.


He sentenced Kurt Kruger, 17, to detention and five months of boot camp for helping a friend steal DVDs from Wal-Mart.

Several other lawsuits on behalf of the juveniles who have appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom have emerged.

The private juvenile detention centers, owned by Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp., are still operating and are not a target of the federal investigation, according court documents. The company cooperated in the investigation, the documents said.

A spokesman from the company denied that its current owner, Gregory Zappala, knew about the kickbacks.

Ciavarella assured the community that he could provide justice. Elected to the bench in 1996, he once ran for judge on the promise that he would punish "people who break the law," according to local reports.

The corruption began in 2002, when Conahan shut down the state juvenile detention center and used money from the Luzerne County budget to fund a multimillion-dollar lease for the private facilities. Despite some raised eyebrows from the community, county commissioners approved the deal.

The federal government began investigating in 2006.

"It's been a dark cloud hanging over the county for a very, very long time," said Luzerne County Commissioner Maryanne C. Petrilla, whose office approved the judges' budgets during the corruption. "I'm looking forward to the ship turning around now and us moving in the right direction."

The kickback scandal highlights a major problem in the juvenile justice system in Luzerne County and across the country, attorneys say. They say hundreds of children who appeared before Ciavarella didn't have lawyers.

"Kids think very much in the present, and they have limited abilities to understand long-term consequences," said Robin Dahlberg, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York who specializes in juvenile issues.

Dahlberg's recent study in Ohio revealed that some of the counties had as many as 90 percent of children going through the court system without a lawyer.

"This Pennsylvania case is a sad reminder of why kids need an attorney," she said.

A 1967 Supreme Court ruling says children have a right to counsel. However, many states allow children and their parents to appear without an attorney by completing a waiver.

Pennsylvania is among about half of the states in the country that allow waivers to be signed for juveniles to appear before a judge without an attorney, legal experts say.

In Luzerne County, teens who waived counsel were at greater risk of being sent to placement center than those with representation.

About 50 percent of the children who waived counsel before Ciavarella were sent to some kind of placement, the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center reports. In comparison, the Juvenile Court Judges' Commission in Pennsylvania found that 8.4 percent of juveniles across the state wind up in placement.

"When you have this many kids waiving counsel, then that's way out of line," said Marsha Levick, an attorney at the Juvenile Law Center. "There was no record [Ciavarella] was assuring the child and parent about the consequences of not having representation."

Minors charged with nonviolent crimes were often given harsher sentences than what probation officers recommended, court documents say. Other investigators say the trials lasted a few minutes at most.

All four of the teens cited in this story say they appeared before Ciavarella without lawyers.

"I was sort of shocked and taken aback," Hillary Transue, the MySpace offender who is now 17, said of her experience in Ciavarella's courtroom in April 2007. "I didn't really understand what was going on."

The Juvenile Law Center says it first red-flagged Ciavarella in 1999 after discovering that a 13-year-old boy was detained without being read his rights and had appeared in court without a lawyer. When the case became public, Ciavarella promised the public that every minor in his courtroom would have a lawyer.

Judges must verbally explain the consequences of appearing in court without counsel to minors and parents, lawyers say. Juvenile Law Center officials say Ciavarella neglected to do so in many cases.

Yet in the past five years, attorneys, law enforcement officials and other judges did not report Ciavarella's behavior to the Judicial Conduct Board of Pennsylvania, says Joseph A. Massa Jr., chief counsel at the board.

Privatizing detention facilities is a growing in popularity among governments because the companies say they offer lower rates than the state.

Pennsylvania has the second highest number of private facilities after Florida, accounting for about 11 percent of the private facilities in the United States, according to the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Critics say private prisons lack transparency because they don't go through the same inspections and audits as a state facility, and this may have allowed payoffs to go so long without being noticed.

"Once somebody is going to make more money by holding more kids, there is a pretty good predictable profit motive," said criminal justice consultant Judith Greene, who heads a nonprofit group called Justice Strategies. "It's predictable that companies are going to tolerate certain behaviors they shouldn't."

An audit draft obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer showed that Luzerne County was spending more than $1.2 million in expenses that weren't allowed under state regulations. The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, the agency overseeing the audits, says the audit drafts are not final.

The audits also allege that two people paid the judges. Attorneys for former Mid-Atlantic owner Robert Powell say that their client is one of those people but that he was pressured by the judges to make payments. The attorneys say Powell never offered to pay the judges, never sought to influence any juvenile case and is now cooperating with the investigation. Zappala and Powell were partners until Zappala bought out Powell in 2008.

Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim of Berks County is reviewing the cases for minors who appeared before Ciavarella. Court officials say some children may have their records expunged or be granted new hearings.

The Philadelphia Bar Association has expressed outrage, assuring the public that the rest of the judges on the state's bench are "composed of highly qualified, honorable and honest people, who take their responsibilities to the public very seriously."

But some of the children -- many who, like Phillip Swartley, are now young adults -- have become jaded and believe that their cases were tainted in Ciavarella's courtroom.

After being sent to boarding school, Phillip, now 15, became withdrawn and depressed, his mother says.

"What do these kids see of the legal system and of authority figures?" Amy Swartley asked. "These kids see people who abuse their power. Now, we have a whole county and generation of children who have lost trust in the system."

Imagine seeing this on national television...this was uncalled for..

Sharon

SEATTLE (AP) - A King County sheriff's deputy kicks a 15-year-old girl, slams her to the floor of a jail cell, strikes her and pulls her hair in violence captured on videotape.

Prosecutors released the surveillance video in Friday in the assault case against Deputy Paul Schene, who is accused of using excessive force on the girl.

The footage shows the attack beginning after the girl enters the cell at suburban SeaTac City Hall and kicks off one of her shoes toward the deputy.

Schene, 31, pleaded not guilty to fourth-degree assault in Superior Court on Thursday.

The incident last November began after the girl was brought in for an auto theft investigation, according to court documents.

``We believe this case is beyond just police misconduct, it's criminal misconduct,'' King County Prosecutor Daniel Satterberg said. ``This is clearly excessive force.''

Satterberg added the case is uncommon because cameras captured the entire incident.

Schene was investigated previously for shooting two people - killing one - in the line of duty in 2002 and 2006. Both times his actions were found to be justified, said Ian Goodhew, prosecutor's deputy chief of staff.

Calls by The Associated Press to Schene's lawyer Anne Bremner were not immediately returned Friday. Bremner, however, released a statement to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in which she said the video does not tell the whole story. Bremner had asked Judge Catherine Shaffer to not release the video to the media.

``As we argued to the judge, it will inflame public opinion and will severely impact the deputy's right to a fair trial,'' Bremner said.

In the video, a deputy kicks the girl, pushing her back toward the wall. The deputy then strongly backs the girl against the wall, and slams her to the floor by grabbing her hair. A second deputy enters the holding cell, while the first deputy holds the girl face down to the floor. The first deputy appears to hit the girl with his hands. The girl is then lifted up and led out of the cell while the first deputy holds her hair.

The second officer shown in the video was a trainee at the time and is not under investigation, Goodhew said.

According to court documents, the girl complained of breathing problems after the incident and medics were called to check her. A short time later, she was taken to a youth detention center and booked for investigation of auto theft and third-degree assault, the latter accusation dealing with her conduct toward the deputy. The girl has pleaded not guilty to taking a motor vehicle without permission, Goodhew said Friday, adding she was never formally charged with assault.

Schene told investigators through an e-mail conversation with his lawyer that once he was assaulted by the girl kicking her shoe at him, he entered the cell to ``prevent another assault,'' according to court documents. Schene also said that the girl failed to comply with instructions in the holding area.

Prosecutors said Schene did not explain why he struck the girl after he had her in a holding position on the floor.

TACOMA, Wash. -- A Fife man was arrested Friday, accused of abusing his 5-month-old daughter, reported KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.

Mary Bridge Hospital Emergency staff said they were treating the girl for a broken femur and an injury to her mouth on Friday and discovered previous injuries, including a broken and mended rib cage and a hip injury.

Hospital staff said the injury to the girl's mouth was consistent with a pattern of abuse described as shoving a bottle with excessive force into the baby’s mouth.

Because hospital personnel said the injuries were not consistent with the parents' stories, Fife police and Child Protection Services were notified.

An investigation revealed that the parents, who brought the child to the hospital, were not married but also had the injured child in common along with a nearly 2-year-old son together.

The parents had been living together in Fife and were found to have had a domestic violence history, police said.

At the completion of an interview with police, officers arrested the man for suspicion of first-degree assault of a child.

Both children were placed into protective custody.

How could he not know or see the abuse?

Janet

PORTAGE, Ind. (AP) - A school bus driver has been charged with felony child neglect for allegedly doing nothing to stop three teenage boys from terrorizing female students on his route.

Court documents say Terry Burch, 67, of Portage, failed to prevent physical abuse to the girls or failed to report it.

The documents filed Friday also say Burch did nothing when the three boys - two 17-year-olds and one 16-year-old - threatened Burch and others, exposed their genitals on the bus, exposed their buttocks to passing motorists, ignited a flammable body spray and created other disruptions.

Burch denied knowing such behavior was occurring on the bus, said Cpl. Troy Williams, a Portage Township schools resource officer.

A message seeking comment left Saturday at Burch's home was not immediately returned.

Burch told the Portage Township School Board on Monday that drivers cannot see what happens in the back of buses and that no parents notified him of problems.

One girl who claims to have been repeatedly groped on the bus told officers she reported the abuse to Burch more than once.

The 16-year-old faces juvenile charges of sexual battery and attempted sexual battery. One 17-year-old faces charges of strangulation and intimidation, and the other is charged with sexual battery.

Porter County Prosecutor Brian Gensel is seeking to have the boys' cases moved to adult court.