Roy Exum: Ooltewah & The Bullies

  • Wednesday, August 24, 2016
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

During the week of Christmas I got an email from a longtime friend at the Knoxville News-Sentinel that laughingly wondered what kind of basketball do you people play (in Chattanooga?) It included sketchy details of the rape, and subsequent surgery, of an Ooltewah High School basketball player who had been assaulted by his own teammates at a Gatlinburg holiday tournament.

Today I honestly believe had that email never been sent, none of us would have known about the absolute worst moment of our high school sports history. I can tell you exactly why every single Ooltewah official and the Department. of Education didn’t report it, as well as what the concerted wall of silence cost our entire community.

So, yes, the media was responsible. The school system wouldn’t even acknowledge the travesty for three weeks. By then Chattanooga had become a catch-word on the nightly news for weeks and, because of several “hardship” players who were recruited to play from the inner city, the entire Ooltewah area was soon likened to hell itself.

Actually, the only reason the rape ever came to light was because an emergency-room official at UT Hospital in Knoxville, realizing that a most heinous crime had occurred, reported it to the Knoxville police as emergency responders are required to do. In the way newspaper people ferret out stories, the police report circulated from the newsroom into the sports department and soon I got the morbid news.

Last Friday, when the Hamilton County School Board released a 24-page report on the travesty, school board member David Testerman laid part of the blame on the "media and the influence of violence in our culture.” His remarks were offensive to some in the newspaper, radio and TV business but, knowing and respecting David like I do, I believe he may have misspoken but in essence he was exactly right.

A former educator and coach, Testerman knows what our kids are exposed to by the social media, the R-rated television shows, and the vicious attacks by our political candidates on one another. It’s hardly a stretch to acknowledge both of our presidential contenders as bullies of the first order. Our children see this. They hear their parents laughing. Connect the dots.

Blend in the hate-filled rancor of the trouble-making felons who hide behind the earnest message of groups like “Black Lives Matter” and the black-on-black shootings that blight the very neighborhoods where the students in our troubled i-Zone schools live … is it any wonder our children respond to the examples we set for them?

There is absolutely no question we have a horrible epidemic of bullying in Chattanooga. The Ooltewah catastrophe was so horrible and vile it opened our community’s eyes. Within a month I found the Hamilton County Department of Education was rife with flagrant – that’s right, flagrant – student abuse by others and that was inconceivable to me. When I confronted it, I received emails by the dozens from parents all over the school district.

Now what? I’ve already received three impassioned emails about children being bullied since school started a week ago. Sale Creek, Signal Mountain Middle and Chattanooga Christian have problems right now. But alert school officials can stop it. One email was so bad I forwarded it to the District Attorney General’s office and the Department of Education. I will intercede for a child anywhere because, in today’s society, too many of us are saying, “That’s not my job” or, “Somebody else can fix that.”

Anybody who knows about bullying or hazing of any other human being and does nothing about it is as guilty as the very ones who glory in it. Yet those who don’t report it are the first to complain about the lack of discipline in our schools. Can you imagine a teacher’s benefit if he or she would only take the stance of the bullied and cry, “Enough is enough. This stops now.”

Since this spring, District Attorney Neal Pinkston and Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond have led an investigation into bullying. They will present those findings to the new school board when its new members join the group and are sworn in at the September meeting. I dare say it will be vastly different than the school board report on just Ooltewah.

You’ll hear about kids being jabbed with sharp pencils in the restrooms, being spat on riding the bus home, and how some of the nicest kids in any neighborhood are drawn into bullying for two reasons: they are desperate to be in the ‘in crowd’ and they are scared to death that if they don’t join the predators they will become the prey.

I really believe that if Jesse Nayadley – the former athletic director at Ooltewah – had defended his sophomore son who was enduring being “racked” with three other first-year players in the darkened dressing room at Ooltewah last year, we would have never had basketball players anally assaulted in Gatlinburg at that holiday tournament. If that’s cruel and targeted, so be it, but there has been a culture, a sickening acceptance, in Ooltewah athletics for years. Admit it, fix it, and let no child live in fear any longer.

I was reading not long ago about some football team up north that has won six straight championships. It seems the seniors put protective pads in the freshmen’s pants instead of the other way around. They serve the freshmen water before they drink during practice. They even shine the freshmen’s shoes on game day. The first couple of years the older players grumbled but now – six straight titles later -- they’ve all bought in because this year’s seniors will never forget what the star players did their freshman year.

Yet some love picking on little people. The new hazing, as Testerman alluded, is in texts and tweets and emails. Every parent should read their children’s emails, texts and have open discussions about bullying.  A child’s privacy? Are you kidding me! I believe any teacher, coach or principal entrusted with the care of a minor should also be able to demand to know what is being sent to that child, or if any child is being tormented by another.

I also believe every student – especially in this text-crazy world – should invoke the Volkswagen rule – check cell phones in when you arrive at the assembly plant/school and pick them up when you leave. Not a one needs a cell phone at school and, in an emergency, go to the principal’s office just as generations before you have done.

There are children who are openly bullied in classrooms today. Teachers will confirm it. They will also confirm that little, if anything, is done about it. Public, private, Christian – makes no difference – and teachers, who claim they are bullied too, can and should stop it immediately. Every principal should mandate that a bully should be dealt with immediately and forcibly. And every teacher who is bullied should go to the central office immediately.

Send the bullies in a squad car to Juvenile Court and make their parents or guardian come get them. Trust me, once a Chattanooga police officer hauls two or three bullies to the children’s clink during the middle of the day, word will be around school to stop being a fool. We can stifle the ludicrous behavior the very moment any child has the courage to stand up to it.

It is up to our educators, our parents, our neighbors and a child’s best friends to give them such courage.

royexum@aol.com

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