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School is a place where children learn important lessons and expand their minds, they’re supposed to feel safe and included in the classroom. However, some schools have rules and policies in place that end up making students feel bullied and the opposite of welcome.
Lincoln Elementary School in Gates Pass, a small community located in southern Oregon, had a strict policy where any student who was late would have to go to detention. There were no exemptions and if a child was late for reasons beyond their control, it didn’t matter. One day six year old Hunter showed up late to the school because his mother, Nicole, was feeling under the weather.
She suffers from osteoarthritis, a chronic health condition that makes it hard to function and painful to move, especially in the morning. On top of that, the family car had conked out the same morning when she went to start it. Nevertheless, Nicole did her best to get Hunter to school, but by the time he arrived he was a minute or two late.
Watching him walk in the door with tears in his eyes she decided to return at lunch time to cheer him up. When she walked into the school cafeteria, she was completely shocked to find her 6 year old son sitting all by himself at a lunch table crying.
In front of him was a white partition that served to block his view of all the other kids and a cup with the letter D written on it. This served to loudly denote his detention status to everyone in the room, as if the isolation and partition wasn’t humiliating enough.
Upon seeing this, Nicole pulled her son from school and took him home but before she left, she took a picture of the sad scene. She shared the photo with Hunter’s grandmother who in turn posted it on Facebook where it quickly went viral and amassed over 75K shares. According to the post caption this was the 6th time Hunter had been in detention for reasons beyond his control.
Meanwhile, the school district was being flooded with calls from concerned people across the country who had seen the post. The Camello family had no idea the story had garnered such interest and were going about their business. Hunter’s father Mark had gone to pick up the car and was suddenly pulled aside as he went to pay the bill.
Expecting some bad news about the car, he was instead shocked to find out that people in the community and a local car dealer had rallied together to buy them a new family car! Hunter’s picture and the family’s story had hit a chord and people wanted to do something good for them.
In the end, the school’s detention policy was changed and now there is a designated supervised room that is used instead of the cafeteria, so kids don’t feel singled out and are not publicly shamed.
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