Ohio student, Nick Andre, writes ‘poem’ blasting football team, gets kicked off team, suspended and called a bully
A Rittman High School in Akron, Ohio complete his writing assignment on “What Makes You Angry” by venting about the football team and now finds himself expelled from school.
Nick Andre, age 16, is charged by the school’s principal (according to the school district website) that the student “wrote a mean and disrespectful poem about another student and our athletic director/head coach.”
He characterized the assigned poem as “hazing, harassment.”
Here’s a snippet of the poem, entitled “Stupid”:
Losing season
Favoritism
Nonstop passes from best friend to best friend
Continuously doing what doesn’t work
Dropped passes but yet still the superstar
Yeah, right
Where’s my scholarship?
I can drop passes
Public domain image/Piotr VaGla Waglowski, http://www.vagla.pl
Andre said he had to read his lament in class, which he did.
Next, he ended up suspended for four days and kicked off the football team for the remainder of the season.
Julie Andre, Nick’s mother, met with the principal.
“All he could refer to was bullying,” she told WJW. “This poem was bullying. And my comment was, ‘Why would the teacher entertain this assignment, you know, because you don’t know what you may get from teenage kids. So, to me, I couldn’t understand bullying.”
The angry mother declined to sign her son’s letter of suspension.
Both the Rittman school district superintendent and the Rittman High football coach have refused to speak to local press
