The Erin Cox Case. Again.

Option #1: Curmie was snookered.

We need this guy on the case.
(Sorry, Cumberbatch fans.)

I wrote two stories (1, 2) about the Erin Cox case in Massachusetts. She, you may recall, was the high school volleyball player who was stripped of her team captaincy and suspended for five games for what she claimed was simply picking up a drunken friend at a party at which underage drinking occurred. I even nominated Principal Carla Scuzzarella for a Curmie Award. In fact, she was leading the voting when reader Renee provided a link that suggests that all of Ms. Cox’s allegations of mistreatment were, to coin a phrase, lies.

I know, I know, I was relying on reporting from sources like the Boston Herald and WBZ-TV. I ought to be able to trust them, but I should also know better. Indeed, even when the story spun by Cox and her opportunistic and quite possibly dishonest attorney Wendy Murphy began to unravel, I distrusted school authorities in general so much that I dismissed their claims of due process with a good deal of contempt. (I still don’t believe the denial of a zero tolerance policy, by the way.)

In other words, I was guilty of confirmation bias.

Or perhaps not.

Option #2: All those initial allegations were true.

The only evidence that they weren’t is one story in a monthly local free paper which has been repeated a couple of times but never independently confirmed by a news source you’ve ever heard of. One way or the other, that’s evidence of unethical journalism: either by the big media outlets who didn’t admit their mistake or by The Valley Patriot.

Let’s see: there’s a “handwritten letter to the court” which is quoted but not shown, nor is a link provided. “The officer who charged Cox with possession of alcohol was Boxford Police Officer Brian Neeley, the same officer who wrote the email to the North Andover Schools on her behalf.” So why did he write the e-mail? Moreover, as argued on the Stately McDaniel Manor site:

If we assume this reporting and anonymous “Valley Patriot sources” in the district court and law enforcement are accurate, there remain a number of perplexing questions. If [the Valley Patriot’s Tom] Duggan’s sources for this story do indeed come from the local court and law enforcement, they are not only violating the ethics of their positions, but likely, Massachusetts privacy laws relating to juveniles. This is an inherent problem of this sort of case. Pursuing facts that are hidden behind privacy walls requires someone to breach those walls, always unethically, usually illegally. One may argue that the public has a “right to know,” but there is no such “right” in the Constitution or elsewhere. This also raises the question about whether it is ethical for journalists to entice public employees to violate the public’s trust and even the law. After all, this is hardly an issue of national security or the betrayal of a vital public trust by a high governmental official. There is not a great deal of honor in whistleblowing in such cases.

Moreover:

In any reasonable interpretation of Duggan’s prose, the local police are saying that when [school district lawyer Geoffrey] Bok wrote that Cox was arrested, he was “not correct,” or in common, everyday English, he lied. Yet Duggan says that there is no evidence that Bok lied, citing the distinction I have drawn regarding physical custody arrests and citations. Apparently the local police think that distinction important and believe that Cox was not arrested. Because even a citation is actually an arrest, this would tend to support Murphy and the police, not Duggan or Bok.

Mike McDaniel concludes:

Regular readers know I am anything but a defender of the mainstream media. Perhaps they have not retracted their stories because they do not have definitive proof they were wrong. Can we believe Duggan’s anonymous sources? Perhaps. As I wrote, it would certainly not be unusual for any teenager in a difficult situation to present them self in the best possible light, even to lie. Perhaps Erin Cox did lie about this. Duggan certainly seems to believe that, but if he does have a copy of Cox’s handwritten “confession,” he is also sufficiently savvy not to publish it or to reveal from whom he received it. That could be legally expensive. It is possible, too, that the police and courts wanted that information leaked, so the leakers had nothing to fear, but that opens another can of ethical and legal worms, and arguably a larger and more convoluted can….

I’ll continue to dig toward a resolution I can report with confidence. Until then, you have all the facts I’ve been able to discover. I recommend that you, gentle readers, don’t hold your breath.

Apart from the fact that Curmie has a special affection for those who address their audience as “gentle readers,” I think McDaniel makes a lot of sense.

The fact is that these waters are very muddy indeed. Did the national and regional (i.e., Boston) media sensationalize the story and then abandon it when things got complicated? Of course. Was Cox in possession of alcohol? Perhaps. Did the school provide an appropriate hearing? Perhaps. Were Principal Scuzzarella’s actions worthy of a Curmie Award? If, but only if, the anonymous sources and reporting of a small-town free press are on the up and up. So whereas I urge you to vote for the 3rd Annual Curmies (nominees here; ballot in the upper right corner of this page), I don’t think it’s appropriate to vote for her (and I can’t remove her from the ballot): one of the cardinal principles of our justice system, after all, is the presumption of innocence. Ms. Scuzzarella might be guilty. “Might” isn’t good enough. And if she really did administer justice appropriately, then I apologize for saying otherwise.

Oh, and whatever is or is not true, Erin Cox is a kid. If she really was drinking, well, she wouldn’t exactly be the first teenager to do that. Her mother and lawyer may be irredeemable, but she isn’t. Let’s let her grow up and see what happens.

Three Volleyball Stories That Aren't About Volleyball

[EDIT: It turns out that Erin Cox may well be a fraud, and that school authorities behaved appropriately. I leave the story up simply as a reminder to us all that a little skepticism is seldom misplaced. Curmie apologizes to Principal Scuzzarella and the other school officials.]

So what is it with high school volleyball these days? Not one, not two, but three stories have come across Curmie’s virtual desk in recent weeks. One, I’ve already written about: the case of North Andover (MA) High School’s Erin Cox (left), who was stripped of her captaincy of the volleyball team and suspended for several games for collecting a drunken friend at a party so the other girl wouldn’t be driving home drunk, endangering herself, others, property… well, you know all the reasons not to drive while impaired.

There’s an update, and it will surprise no one. The school district has doubled down on its idiocy in a petulant display worthy of a six-year-old… or a Tea Party Congressman, which is pretty much the same thing. Naturally, there’s the denial of the zero tolerance policy (chances that Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson is lying: slightly greater that 99%, but—to be fair—less than ontological certitude). There’s the claim that the reason the school isn’t commenting further is a concern for the student’s privacy rights—no, really, it isn’t that they don’t have a f*cking case; it’s all about laws and privacy and whatever else they can think of so they can throw their temper tantrums and no one will be able to prove anything. Let’s face it: if it’s Ms. Cox’s rights they’re concerned about, well, it’s not like there are a lot of people in the area who don’t know what she’s been charged with or what the punishment was, ya know? She has the right to privacy. She also has the right to waive those rights. Challenge her to do so, if you’re really concerned about her instead of maintaining dictatorial control over your petty fiefdom.

(Side note: the owner of the property—the mother of the boy hosting the party—faced no repercussions because “police said she wasn’t aware of the party.” Good mother, that.)

Most interestingly, there’s a rather relevant section of the school’s official Athletic Handbook:

MIAA [Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association] Rule- 62 From the earliest fall practice date, to the conclusion of the academic year or final athletic event (whichever is latest), a student shall not, regardless of the quantity, use, consume, possess, buy/sell, or give away any beverage containing alcohol; any tobacco product; marijuana; steroids; or any controlled substance. This policy includes products such as “NA or near beer”. It is not a violation for a student to be in possession of a legally defined drug specifically prescribed for the student’s own use by his/her doctor.

This MIAA statewide minimum standard is not intended to render “guilt by association”, e.g. many student athletes might be present at a party where only a few violate this standard….

(Curmie has added the boldface emphasis, but not otherwise altered the mispunctuated original.) Apart from that significant injunction against assuming guilt by association, there’s also the key consideration that there is no apparent evidence that Ms. Cox “used, consumed, possessed, bought/sold, or gave away” anything alcoholic. She is, in short, not in violation of school policy.

The good news: a huge outpouring of support for Ms. Cox: nearly 20,000 virtual signatures on a Change.org petition and over $7000 (as of this writing) raised in a GoFundMe campaign. [EDIT: the GoFundMe appeal has now been taken down at the request of Erin’s mom.]

On to the other stories… we start in Dayton, Iowa (no, Alternet, not Ohio), where 12-year-old Dezi Hughes was forced to sit out a volleyball game because she didn’t dress up on game day, wearing instead what you see at right. No story there, right? Many if not most schools require their athletes to demonstrate “school pride” in this manner. (Curmie is not sure how that equation works, but acknowledges its ubiquity.) And if you don’t follow the rules, you don’t play.

Here’s the thing. Ms. Hughes isn’t just any high school kid. She and a friend, Kathlynn Shepherd, were kidnapped in May by a sex offender. Shepherd was killed; Hughes managed to escape.

Volleyball, apparently, has become an important part of her therapy: a chance to be a kid, to forget, at least for a few moments, the horrible ordeal she endured, not to mention the possibility of survivor’s guilt, given the death of her friend. So, not getting to play is a problem.

Fact is, nobody looks good in this one. The fact that volleyball has become an outlet for Dezi doesn’t mean she should be given preferential treatment. She shouldn’t get a starting job she doesn’t deserve, for example. And there’s not—to my mind, at least—a substantive difference between dressing up for school and wearing a uniform at the game. Both are arbitrary requirements, but both are the rules, whether established by the school and the coaching staff on the one hand or by the athletic conference on the other. So why shouldn’t she be expected to follow the same strictures as everyone else?

On the other hand, if there are legitimate reasons why Dezi doesn’t want to dress up—if that would somehow remind her of what she was wearing the day she was kidnapped, for example, then the school’s “rules are rules” attitude would be somewhere between boorish and cruel. Certainly cutting a little slack for an apparent first offense under the circumstances would seem warranted. Conversely, if there’s a legitimate reason why wearing nice clothes—and, let’s face it, no one would suggest the outfit Dezi wore on the day in question qualifies—would somehow impede the girl’s recovery, then the time to make that argument is before she gets told she can’t play because she violated team rules. Does the school look good in this? No. But this isn’t even honorable mention Curmie material.

What is? Well, Naples (FL) Middle School’s letter to the parents of 11-year-old Lily Grasso would qualify. To be fair, the school was simply following a stupid rule established by the legislature; this is Florida, after all. And the Grasso clan did over-react, but certainly their response is understandable. Anyway, Lily is listed at 5’3” and 124 pounds (there’s some dispute as to whether they even got her height right), giving her a body mass index (BMI) of 22. That, according to the “fat letter” that was sent after a screening by the Collier County Health Department, makes her “at risk.” A link on the form sends you to the Centers for Disease Control website, which cheerfully informs us that a child with a BMI% of 89.56—Lily’s percentile—is “overweight.” Lost in the fine print are the caveats:

BMI is not a diagnostic tool. For example, a child may have a high BMI for age and sex, but to determine if excess fat is a problem, a health care provider would need to perform further assessments. These assessments might include skinfold thickness measurements, evaluations of diet, physical activity, family history, and other appropriate health screenings.

In other words, BMI isn’t worth a hell of a lot as a determinant of health or fitness or anything else. Muscle weighs more than fat; 11-year-old bodies are changing; health can’t be determined by any single measurement… need we go on?

A reasonable approach would be to trust that parents know whether their kid has weight issues. A reasonable approach would be to allow doctors rather than charts to determine health. BTW, Clayton Kershaw, widely regarded as the best baseball player in the world right now, has a BMI of 27.1; NBA Most Valuable Player LeBron James is at 27.5; NFL MVP Adrian Peterson checks in at 28.6; former All-Pro defensive tackle Casey Hampton: 42.9. All of those world-class athletes are considered “overweight” for an adult male, except for Hampton, who’s over a dozen points higher than the cutoff for obese. I’d call those guys reasonably fit, nonetheless. But this is state government, school districts, and Florida, all at the same time: a triple whammy if ever there was one. The idea that expertise matters is alien to all of these constituencies, of course. After all, it’s a short step from believing a calculation that puts some of the world’s best athletes into the “overweight” range might be… erm… flawed to thinking that standardized tests aren’t the best measure of academic accomplishment, and we certainly can’t have that.

Childhood obesity is a problem. But so is female self-image. Tell an athletic, healthy, 11-year-old girl that she’s “at risk” because of her height and weight, or “overweight,” and what she hears is “fat.” And if there’s anything our society won’t allow women to be, it’s that. The number of eating disorders these intrusive letters generate will far outweigh any good that come of increased attention to maintaining healthy diets and exercise regimens. You, Gentle Reader, know a perfectly healthy adult woman who agonizes over gaining a pound, much less a dress size. Perhaps you are that woman. And stupid charts and form letters that tell the girl in the picture to the left that she’s overweight are one place this obsession with thin takes hold. (Note: if girls are subject to over-sensitivity to the idea of being too heavy, Curmie, who graduated from college with a BMI of 17.5—“underweight” is anything below 18.5—can personally attest to the self-image problems of skinny boys.)

A Time magazine article last month called attention to an effort in Massachusetts to abolish the “fat letters.” The article notes that:

Parents and pediatricians have been going back-and-forth on the “fat letter” issue recently after an August report by the American Academy of Pediatrics urged parents to put their pride aside and welcome the screenings and letters, which they say will help parents and their children adopt healthier lifestyles.

“BMI screening letters are an additional awareness tool to promote conversations about healthy eating habits, exercise, and weight in the safety and confidential environment of the child’s home,” read the report.

Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought), he might suggest that the AAP likes the letters primarily because they generate highly remunerative visits to their members, who also, in many cases, get to be the “good guys” and reassure parents that there’s nothing wrong with their kid: “Little Suzie is just fine, Mrs. Smith. That’ll be $200. You can pay at the desk as you leave.” It’s worth noting, too, that the “overweight” and “obese” ratings seem to be based on BMI%, not BMI per se. In other words, the highest 5% of BMIs will always and forever be considered “obese,” whether that is an accurate description, even in BMI terms, of 1% or 20% of the population.

More importantly, the principal advantage to BMI as a tool is that it’s easy: easy enough that parents could do it on their own (as if glancing at their kid weren’t enough to give a rough idea). How hard is it to measure your child’s height? There are short horizontal lines at various heights on walls and door jambs all over the country that suggest the process isn’t terribly taxing. Then you plop the kid on a scale, enter the results into one of the manifold online calculators, and bammo-whammo, you know the BMI. So why, exactly, do we need to spend public funds to do this? Why should government be allowed to intrude into the private medical details of, well, anyone? And, especially since we’re talking about growing, changing bodies, why on earth would anyone pay the slightest attention to any of this? But to ignore the authority of the “fat letter” takes either educated resolve or ignorant bluster, and the majority of the population will adopt neither of those approaches. The point is, parents who care about this stuff have ready means to take appropriate measures. Those who don’t—whether that hesitation comes from skepticism about the usefulness of BMI as a determinant of relevant information or dismissiveness of the legitimate perils of obesity—aren’t going to care what the stupid form says.

Anyway, all these stories are about volleyball, but none of them are really about volleyball, are they? They say (whoever “they” are) that sports are a microcosm of life. These three stories, about incompetent school administrators, bureaucratic intransigence, and nannyish intrusion would certainly seem to suggest as much.

Now That's a Curmie Contender

[EDIT: It turns out that Erin Cox may well be a fraud, and that school authorities behaved appropriately. I leave the story up simply as a reminder to us all that a little skepticism is seldom misplaced. Curmie apologizes to Principal Scuzzarella and the other school officials.]

Even a quick perusal of the nominees for Curmie Awards past (2011 nominees here, 2012 nominees here) will reveal some of my particular bêtes noires when it comes to school administrations: punishing students (or faculty) who didn’t do anything wrong, clinging to inane “zero tolerance” policies, attempting to police legal behavior that takes place off school grounds. A recent case in North Andover, MA, rolls all of these personal pet peeves into one tidy bundle.

Erin Cox (left) is a senior at North Andover High School. She’s an honor student and is, or was, the captain of the volleyball team, and a two-time all-star. A couple of weeks ago, she got a text from an underage friend who thought (no doubt correctly) that she was too intoxicated to drive home from a party. So Cox went to pick her up to give her a ride home. Unfortunately for Ms. Cox, she arrived at about the time the cops did (different reports say she got there just before, just as, or just after the police showed up). The police made several arrests, but recognized the fact that Cox was neither drunk not in possession of alcohol, so she was not among those arrested. Still, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, she appears to have been “summoned to court for drinking.” Given the fact the police obviously found no evidence against her, and apparently agreed that she had not been drinking—not to mention the fact that she could readily prove that she hadn’t been at the party even as a bystander—this constituted more than a little over-reach, but, as Fox News reports, “police later backed Cox's version of events.”

In other words, there was no harm done… until the cretinous yahoos at the high school got into the act, that is. Principal Carla Scuzzarella, you see, stripped Cox of her team captaincy and suspended her from five games, because… well, because. There’s a zero tolerance policy, of course, and Scuzzarella, who would apparently have to evolve to have the brains of a rotting rutabaga, dutifully exacted what apparently passes for justice in her little fiefdom. Needless to say, Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson, just as addle-pated as his minion, rushed to her defense, babbling about how participation in athletics is a privilege and claiming that student-athletes receive due process and a fair hearing. The fact that there is no evidence of such a hearing, or any common sense attributable to anyone in that administration, rather undercuts that argument, however, does it not?

Cox sued the district to re-instate her on the team. The court ruled it had no jurisdiction (one wonders who does), but not before the school’s attorney, one Geoffrey Bok, allegedly claimed that Cox had been arrested: that would be, to coin a phrase, a lie. Cox’s lawyer, Wendy Murphy, made the following statement:

That a school would then lie to a judge in a court of law is an outrage and shows the length some school officials will go to to retaliate against a family that dares to challenge an irrational zero tolerance policy.

In fact, as the police officer at the scene reported in a statement that was provided to the principal and the judge, Erin was not arrested and did nothing wrong. He added that she had not been drinking, had no intention of drinking, was there to help a friend and did not have even the ‘slightest’ odor of alcohol on her person.

So let’s review the bidding. There’s a zero tolerance policy about drugs and alcohol. Such policies are always, and I do mean always the result of an administration too morally craven and/or too intellectually comatose to recognize that one size never fits all.

This policy, moreover, applies to off-campus events, where the school has no legitimate jurisdiction. If the police choose to act, that is their decision and their responsibility. The school might, then, reasonably, apply sanctions to students found guilty of a crime… or, perhaps, even those charged with one. But the school district, however much they might wish it to be otherwise, is neither a law enforcement nor a judicial authority. Oh, and of course in this case, the school's lawyer appears to have lied in court in a Hail-Mary attempt to make the principal’s absurd over-reach a little less ridiculous.

Finally, of course, there’s the fact that Erin Cox not only did nothing wrong, she in fact did something right. Were it not for her, her friend might well have driven away from the party before the police arrived, putting a drunken teenager behind the wheel of a car. At the very least, she is to be praised for acting responsibly—and, if I might say so, maturely—in taking care of her friend; the friend, too, while not all her decisions that night were the best, did at least have the sense to ask her friend—Cox—to drive her home. Both these decisions—to ask for help and to give it—are admirable. Both, of course, are being punished by an administration too concerned with rules and too little concerned with moral responsibility, justice, or education. For if nothing else comes of this case, the next time a situation like this comes up, some student somewhere is going to hesitate to do the right thing; some friend is going to be reluctant to ask for a ride; sooner or later, someone is going to get hurt or killed… all because Principal Scuzzarella has neither the moral authority nor the intellect to do her job.

Needless to say, public opinion from observers from the left, right and center on this case is running overwhelmingly in favor of Ms. Cox and against the Silly Squad at the high school. Of course, there’s one exception: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the quintessence of a narcissistic enterprise if ever there was one. Only the Susan G. Komen Foundation offers any real opposition in the competition to be the alleged charity most about itself and least about its stated cause. Drunk driving is still very much a concern, but MADD per se hasn’t been relevant for at least a generation, if indeed it ever was. So color me unsurprised that they’d object to getting a drunk driver off the road and would side with the authoritarian morons. 17-year-old designated drivers weren’t their idea, after all.

So yes, MADD gets to share in the ignominy of being shown to be ridiculous. But they’re not eligible for a Curmie Award. Scuzzarella and her gaggle of brainless dissemblers, on the other hand: that, my friends, is Curmie material.