<p>I would notify the parents. And I sincerely doubt the school notified them - he is an adult, and privacy laws being what they are, I don’t think that they would do that. How easy for him to just tell them that he wants to transfer. They need to know that he confessed. That makes it a bit hard for them to bury their heads in the sand. This kid needs help, and he won’t get it if they don’t know about it. As to your son, he needs your support, but he needs to deal with the betrayal. It’s a life lesson, albeit a hard one. And yes, the school could have known if he had been in trouble before. A friend who works at a small LAC (we were classmates when we attended there many years ago) told me that he can’t believe how reporting to your probation officer has become a badge of honor. Yet, the school cannot reveal that. So many courts want the kids in school and make it a condition of their probation. They have to go somewhere. Not a great situation, but… My friend’s son had a roommate that was mentally unstable, and had been for some time. When his roommate refused to leave him alone and threatened him, friend’s son finally had had enough and he pushed him out the door. The unstable young man filed criminal charges. After many thousands of dollars, he was exonerated, but he left the school after the next semester because the school did everything to protect the unstable young man, and nothing to help son’s friend. The fact that he cut himself, and threatened son’s friend with a knife meant nothing to them. I finally told her to call the Dean, and they were going to move the young man, but would need a couple days to do it, and they told him it was because of friend’s son! That lead to the altercation. They really need to learn how to deal with all this better. These things happen, and the victims usually get victimized even more. Your son learned this the hard way. It’s hard when we can’t just fix it for our children.</p>
<p>So sorry to read about that LAC & how they failed to protect their students from the violent & unstable student. Scary!</p>
<p>When my D was in 3rd grade, they had a new student who was mentally unstable. The teacher told all the kids that they had to “help him adjust” to the new school. He would threaten to KILL the other students & had to be pulled off by an adult when he was literally choking another student on the playground on his 1st day at school.
One day they had a sub who ran screaming from the classroom, pounding her head on the door or wall, screaming she couldn’t take it any more. My D became afraid to go to school for the 1st time in her life & wouldn’t tell me why–I had to learn from another parent whose kid heard about the incident in the classroom. The school refused to tell me anything about any of this. I transferred my D to another school, even tho it was in the middle of the school year because the school was doing NOTHING to protect the children & in fact BLAMED the kids for causing the teacher to “lose it.”</p>