Should the AP in the Abby Zwerner Case Be Criminally Charged?

So the assistant principal in the Abigail Zwirner case has now been charged with eight felony counts of child neglect for failing to investigate when several staff members reported that the student had brought a firearm to school, the first grader who ended up shooting Abigail Zwirner.

I think this is probably an appropriate set of charges.

Like this was legitimately a dangerous situation.

And as a school administrator, you have an obligation to promptly deal with any potential safety concern.

And this is a major, like this is as bad as it gets safety concern wise, right?

That there's a firearm on campus, that a student is planning to harm somebody else.

Nobody wants to hear this.

Nobody wants to start their day that way.

But this is the job, right?

If you have a serious concern brought to you, you got to deal with it.

And she didn't deal with it.

The reason I think she probably will be acquitted, like, I'm not really predicting that she's going to be convicted on these charges, is, like, we only heard about this case, the rest of us only heard about this case after we knew what had actually happened, right?

If you are in that situation, not to downplay the responsibility at all, but, like, if you're in the situation and somebody comes to you and says a first grader has brought a firearm to school, like...

Has that ever happened before?

Like, I don't know.

I'm sure it has.

But nothing like this case had ever happened before.

So I have to say I have a certain amount of sympathy with her reasoning in that moment.

Like, come on.

A first grader has a gun in his pocket.

Like, come on.

I get the skepticism.

I get the reluctance to believe these reports.

What I don't get is the reluctance to follow through on them.

Even if you don't believe that this is what has actually happened, even if you don't believe that anything serious is going to occur, you still have an obligation to investigate and to handle it.

So I think there's a situation of hindsight being 20-20 here that, like, we know what happened.

It's easy...

to look at that situation and say, oh, well, she should have known.

I don't think she should have known.

I don't think it was reasonable to expect that this situation would occur.

Just as with the insurance claim that like, that this should be covered by workers' comp because this is like a workplace, like a normal workplace injury.

No, this was not a normal workplace injury.

It is not normal for a first grader to shoot his teacher.

Nothing about this situation is normal.

So I totally understand the assistant principal saying, being really skeptical about these reports because it is not normal for a first grader to bring a firearm to school and intend to hurt somebody with it.

It's just, this is just not a normal thing.

This is a pretty unprecedented, maybe a completely unprecedented thing.

Now, again, does that really get her off the hook legally?

I don't know.

I don't think so because...

we do have an obligation to do something.

So, I mean, ultimately this comes down to the jury and the prosecution.

Like, I don't like this idea of prosecuting educators for doing their best.

I do think there does need to be accountability when somebody clearly does something that was not their best and that people got hurt and that they made the wrong call.

But I don't know.

Let me know what you think about this.

This is a complicated one because this was unprecedented.

Her responsibilities were clear.

But the situation, I think, really caught a lot of people off guard, including her.

Let me know what you think.