What started as a dispute between a parent and principal in Florida over alleged elementary-school cyberbullying has escalated.
Now the angry Polk County mother is attempting to hold her daughter’s school and the entire district school board responsible for what she sees as chronic mishandling of bullying reports.
The dispute began when a 5th-grade girl at Rosabelle W. Blake Academy in Lakeland, Florida, allegedly posted a TikTok video that dramatizes her shooting an 11-year-old classmate in the head.
The Polk County State Attorney’s Office now is deciding whether to charge the child for violating a Florida statute that makes it illegal to make “written or electronic threats to kill or do bodily injury,” according to the Lakeland Police Department.
A school bus rolls down the street in Gainesville, Fla., after school on Jan. 23, 2023. Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times
But school officials didn’t see the video as a problem.
And the only person who received discipline, of sorts, was the mother of the child shown as slain in the video.
After Trisha Brown took her daughter out of school for the last few weeks of the education year and returned to demand answers about the incident from school officials, she was told she'd be trespassing if she returned to the campus.
Four days after the video was brought to the school’s attention, Polk County Public Schools released a statement saying thatchildren “do foolish things on social media,” but said school officials take such incidents “seriously and investigate them to determine if there is a credible threat to anyone’s safety.”
Ms. Brown sees the video as a death threat.
Trisha Brown is determined to have bullying stamped out at schools. Courtesy of Trisha Brown
Six weeks after the issue began, a Polk County judge agreed with her concerns, issuing a restraining order against the student who allegedly made the video, saying there was a “credible threat.”
The child is not allowed to speak to or approach Ms. Brown’s daughter for a year.
But Ms. Brown isn’t satisfied yet.
Her daughter missed her 5th-grade graduation ceremony and celebration because the principal and school resource officer refused to take proper action, she said.
Now, Ms. Brown wants to draw people’s attention to what she sees as an education system with leaders who refuse to follow their own policies and provide a safe environment for all children.
“All I do know is that I want to make sure that no other mother has to ever feel the way that I do and that no other child has to finish out their school year at home because they’re too scared to go to school, and that no other mother has to fight this hard,” Ms. Brown said.
“I’ve lost out on days of work. I’ve lost out on sleep. And I just want to make sure that this does not happen again.”
The principal and a school resource officer at Blakely Academy did not respond to repeated requests for comment by The Epoch Times.
Troubling Video Depicts Execution
When the video first appeared on TikTok, Ms. Brown’s daughter, who doesn’t use social media, learned about the video in a text from a friend.
The 37-second video uses still images and computer-generated audio to show Ms. Brown’s daughter bullying the child who apparently posted the video, The Epoch Times confirmed.
“You see, I run this school right here. When I ask for your lunch money, you give it to me,” an image of Ms. Brown’s daughter says in the video. “Give me your lunch money before I get crazy up in here.”
At that point, an avatar representing the child who allegedly posted the video pulls out a gun and shoots the avatar representing Ms. Brown’s daughter.
Ms. Brown said she was shocked the girl, someone her daughter considered a friend, would make such a video. She brought it to the school’s attention the same day.
School authorities told her both girls were interviewed, and it was determined no real threat existed, as there was no previous evidence of bullying, Ms. Brown said.
The Lakeland Police Department confirmed that in a statement released on May 19.
“The student mentioned in the video did not feel threatened by the video or the student who made the video since they are friends,” the statement reads.
“A threat assessment was completed, and an officer conducted a home visit at the residence of the student who made the video. No weapons were located.
“We take all incidents of alleged threats seriously and work closely with our school professionals to ensure students have a safe learning environment.”
Students run from Columbine High School under cover from police after two masked teens on a "suicide mission" stormed the school, executing fellow students before turning guns on themselves in Littleton, Colo. on April 20, 1999. Mark Leffingwell/Getty Images
But after the questioning, Ms. Brown received a call from her daughter, who said she was hiding in a bathroom at school. The girl said to have made and posted the video was threatening to “beat her [expletive],” Ms. Brown said.
She pulled her daughter out of school that day, and the child completed the final two weeks of the school year online.
The School’s Response
After beginning the process to request a restraining order from a Polk County judge, Ms. Brown brought documentation to the school principal and the school resource officer, asking once again if there was anything they could do, she said.
They told her that there was nothing the school could do because the video was made off campus over the weekend and did not involve any school-owned device, Ms. Brown said.
She presented principal Ava Brown with Polk County’s policy on bullying, she said.
The policy states that students found making a threat involving school “shall be expelled, with or without continuing educational services, from the student’s regular school for a period of no less than one full year.”
A page for the application TikTok is shown on a cell phone in front of a screen with logos for the company on April 4, 2023. Rick Rycroft/AP Photo
The Polk County Public Schools policy manual also states that bullying and harassment through the use of “computer software that is accessed at a nonschool-related location,“ as well as ”the use of an electronic device that is not leased, owned, or used by the district or school is still prohibited."
Both Polk County’s policy manual and Florida Statutes regarding early learning emphasize that bullying is prohibited if it interferes with the victim’s ability to participate and learn in school.
The meeting seemed to yield no solution, Ms. Brown said. She admitted to raising her voice and shouting expletives at a school resource officer.
An hour after she left that meeting, she said she received a call from an officer, who said she would be trespassing if she returned to the Blake Academy campus.
The principal also told her she would revoke her daughter’s excused absences for the remainder of the year, Ms.
Brown said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at the signing of the state's universal school choice bill at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami on March 27, 2023. Courtesy of the Florida Governor's Office
Polk County Public Schools stood by the handling of the situation.
“School staff have done their best to work with the parent of the alleged victim and make changes that have been requested,” the district said in a statement released on May 19.
“The parent has returned to the school multiple times this week alleging that Blake Academy and the Lakeland Police Department are ignoring the situation, which is patently false.
“The parent’s behavior has escalated to a point of disrupting school operations, which resulted in her being trespassed from campus.”
The statement went on to say, “School staff and law enforcement have been diligent and thorough in their response to this situation. Our staff has worked with the parent to the best of their ability, and we will continue to cooperate with law enforcement as needed.”
Principal Brown and a school resource officer did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
The day after this article was published, Polk County Public Schools spokesman Kyle Kennedy told The Epoch Times that the creation and posting of the video did not meet the criteria for bullying “defined by our policies or the law.”
“I spoke to multiple people that work in the district who work in the discipline office in particular,” Mr. Kennedy said. “And I was told that this did not meet the definition” of bullying that would require discipline.
The TikTok incident occurred outside of school and there was no history of bullying between the two girls, he said. That’s why the student who made and posted the video was not punished, he said.
‘A Credible Threat,’ Judge Says
In June, a judge ruled there was a “serious and credible threat” and placed a restraining order against the child who made the video.
That child’s mother appealed the order, but it was upheld. By order of Polk County Court, that 5th-grade girl cannot contact Ms. Brown’s daughter for a year.
Ms. Brown said that she wouldn’t have felt the need for a restraining order if the school had followed its own policies and handled the situation.
“I wanted this completely handled by the school, and that school completely failed me every single way possible,” she said.
She felt her daughter’s safety didn’t matter to the school, Ms. Brown said. So she was forced to pursue legal action.
Her daughter is now afraid to go to any school—public or private—so they’re exploring ways to homeschool her for the coming academic year, she said.
“Their policy is black and white and stated that that little girl should have been removed and that my daughter should have been protected, and she wasn’t,” Ms. Brown said.
Her daughter was withdrawn “in the middle of the day and didn’t even know that she was never coming back to school,” Ms. Brown said.
“So she didn’t get to say goodbye to her teacher. She didn’t get to say goodbye to her friends that she had made.”
Parents affiliated with Citizens Defending Freedom speak out at a meeting of the school board of Miami-Dade County Public Schools on Sept. 7, 2022. Courtesy Citizens Defending Freedom
Now that she feels her daughter is safe, Ms. Brown has turned her attention to spotlighting how school officials handled her problem and other cases involving bullying and harassment.
She hopes to be awarded damages for missing more than two weeks of work. She‘d also like the Blakely Academy principal and two school resource officers to be removed from their positions of leadership at the school, she said. She says they delayed filing an official report about the incident until after they’d told her she'd be trespassing if she returned to the campus.
That, Ms. Brown said, showed the school resource officer “wasn’t doing anything about it” until “after he could trespass me.”
Ms. Brown appeared before the Polk County School Board on June 13 to share her story and ask to file a formal complaint. As of July 6, she had not been contacted by anyone from the school board, she said.
Bullying Brings Consequences ... For Schools
After the incident, Ms. Brown’s daughter received a HOPE Scholarship. The state funds help victims of bullying and harassment pay for tuition of up to $8,000 at an approved private school.
School principals are required by state law to “submit accurate School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting (SESIR) system and discipline data to the state,” according to the HOPE Scholarship’s website. And they must follow the state Board of Education’s standardized forms to “report data concerning school safety and discipline.”
And each school principal must sign a Hope Scholarship Program Incident Report Form, which outlines the reason for the scholarship. But the Blakely Academy principal did not supply a reason on the form for Ms. Brown’s daughter, The Epoch Times confirmed.
Ms. Brown equates the scholarship to hush money.
“Well, I’m not one to shut up and leave people alone,” she said.
Florida schools are required to keep the incidence of bullying as low as possible. They are graded and that grading determines funding. The higher the grade, the more funds a school receives.
Florida Statutes state that a school district’s “safe school funds” are distributed based on compliance with proper reporting procedures.
Ms. Brown has been assisted through the process by the non-profit organization Citizens Defending Freedom (CDF). The group provided her with guidance and legal counsel in her push to get the restraining order.
The group also is looking into whether schools in Polk County are failing to report and address all bullying and harassment cases, said Pam Luce, Polk County education lead for CDF.
Other area parents have struggled, she said, to get local schools to respond to claims of bullying and harassment.
“I’ve been here going on eight-plus years now,” said Mr. Kennedy, the school district spokesman, about the group’s allegation. “I’ve never heard of that going on in our schools of this district. We investigate and have filed bullying complaints, and that’s an everyday occurrence at a district.
“I’ve never heard anything like that entering the equation, that we can’t report this because it’s going to impact our funding.”
T.J. Muscaro
Author
Based out of Tampa, Florida, TJ primarily covers weather and national politics.
