When Jonesboro, Arkansas mother Valerie Borders goes to court on April 30, she’ll face child endangerment charges and a possible year-long jail sentence (and/or a $1000 fine) for ordering her 10-year-old son, Nequavion, to walk 4.6 miles to school after his school bus privileges were suspended — for a fifth time — due to disruptive behavior.
He actually walked only a few blocks before a bank security guard spotted him, drove him to school, then notified the police.
Now, I could understand people criticizing Ms. Borders (just as, a few years ago, some people thought it was necessary to criticize a New York City mother for allowing her daughter, who was about Nequavion’s age, to take a subway trip across town by herself; yes, this was actually a news story) — but a criminal charge? And up to year in jail?
(Granted, a year-long sentence is unlikely: but the possibility exists, and she’ll have little legal recourse if she happens to draw a judge who’s in a surly mood that day)
So I have to wonder… where’s the line? If a 4.6 walk constitutes child endangerment, how about 3.5? Two-and-a-quarter? Does the judge simply get to channel Justice Potter Stewart and say “I can’t define child endangerment, but I know it when I see it”?
A Google Maps look at Nequavion’s proposed trek shows a rather straightforward path: no crossing of highways, or dangerous cliffs. I’m assuming that rival gangs of drug dealers don’t regularly engage in shootouts across South Caraway Road.
So we’re talking about distance. Not trying to sound like my grandfather here, but when I was 10 I regularly walked to and from the library by myself, a total of 6 miles. My son at that age walked just over 6 miles each year for the March of Dimes Walkathon. It’s true that these were voluntary walks, but Nequavion told police that he thought his punishment was fair.
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© 2012 by Bill Bickel unless otherwise noted.
I don’t think the problem is distsance, but leaving a minor unsupervised in public for the 1 1/2 hour trek. Sadly, there are too many pedophiles out there. The trek itself was a good idea, but maybe mom needed to make it with him.
How many pedophiles are “out there”, d’ya think? This fear without justification is the whole reason for nanny state mentality. I have no problem letting my kids have some responsibility, and I have no problem with the small but non-zero chance something bad might happen. Life’s supposed to have sharp edges. NOT letting my kids do something because I’m scared of “the pedophiles” is just stupid. We live in the safest, most peaceful time of human existence, and I refuse to let fear govern my actions, or allow me to warp my kids’ perception of the world.
It is a myth that there are legions of pedophiles lurking around every corner, just waiting for a 10-year-old to walk by unsupervised. Kids are about 20 times more likely to be abducted by a relative, and even that is rare enough not to merit extraordinary measures to prevent.
Furthermore, the 10-year-old is far more likely to be injured in a car accident while his mother is driving him to school than he is to be abducted by a pedophile while /walking/ to school. If you are arguing on the basis of the child’s safety, you should be praising his mother for not forcing him to ride in a (relative) death trap.
Mentality like this is why I’m afraid to shoot hoops with the kids at school during recess. It’s too easy for people to get the wrong idea these days.
When I was 10, my parents and I went to Paris. They wanted to see Napoleon’s Tomb, but I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. They gave me a map, and let me walk the mile and a half from our hotel to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Once I got there, I got bored pretty quick, so I took the Metro to Napoleon’s Tomb, hoping to catch my parents there, but I was too late, so I took the Metro back to our hotel. I did all this at 10… in a foreign city.
He can walk the 4.6 miles to school as punishment for acting up on the bus. The mom should not be taken to court.
What the heck was a bank security officer (guard?) doing picking up a child he/she didn’t know? Why did the kid get in the car with that man/woman? Perhaps the BSO should be charged with kidnapping – it seems comparable to the mother’s charges. And there really aren’t all that many more pedophiles out there than there were when we were kids. We hear about them more because in our 24 hr. news world we hear about everything, but I doubt that Nequavion was in any real danger – unless it’s from overzealous adults.
Bill, the New York City woman you refer to is national syndicated columnist Lenore Skenazy, and it was her son (she has no daughters) who rode the subway unaccompanied. She has a blog at http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/
Naming the kid Nequavion is closer to child abuse than making him walk a few miles.
My first thought when I saw the poor kid’s name.
What are the odds that his mother is African-American?
I would imagine that to some degree child endangerment has to be “I know it when I see it,” since there are a semi-infinite number of ways to endanger a child. But I know it when I see it, and this isn’t child endangerment.
It’s only child cruelty if the route is uphill both ways. In the snow.
And Nequavion has cardboard in his shoes so the snow doesn’t get through the holes in the soles.
… and beating off bears with your looseleaf binder …
(No, not THAT kind of “beating off”; “fighting”.)
I walked to school when I was 5, although that’s not very impressive if you know that I lived literally next door to the grade school.
Everyone’s already made all the points I would have, except one: the danger of pedophiles snatching children off the street is probably substantially reduced in this period of near-universal cellphone distribution. Which is not to say that there aren’t real risks… it’s just that the real risk of being struck by a car in a crosswalk is probably higher than being snatched by an opportunistic pedophile.
I don’t get this! The kid has his school bus privileges suspended as a discipline measure, and suddenly it’s his mothers responsibility to drive him to school? If walking to school is considered to dangerous (for whatever reason), how *can* they refuse him entry on the school bus?
I do have to agree that the only child endangerment that happened in that story was when the kid got into a car with a bank security guard.
I mean, unless the guard was his father or older sister or something like that.
Five miles is a lot for a ten-year-old to walk to school. But not if he’s already been kicked off the bus for being disruptive. I wouldn’t want to reward my kid for being disruptive by driving him or her after he or she got off the bus — this isn’t even a PUNISHMENT so much as a “your actions have consequences, and these are what they are.”
This seems to me like an example of good parenting.
Agreed. And it wasn’t the first time he’d been disruptive on the bus – it was the sixth. He’d been warned, again and again.
I live in South Texas, where sidewalks are a luxury. If the kid had had to walk along the kinds of streets we have here — two lanes each direction, no curb, no sidewalk, *then* I would have accepted the child endangerment charge. Adults shouldn’t be walking along some of these streets around here.
When this first came out, I followed the path suggested by Google Maps in satellite view. There seem to be both sidewalks and curbs the whole way.
Has the world changed that much? When I was 12 or 13 I used to occasionally walk home from what appears to be that same school in Jonesboro. Not quite as far, since I lived near what was then the State College. Generally we rode the city bus, but it was no big deal to walk instead. My widowed mother had to work, so my brother and I pretty much did whatever we pleased. Nobody would have thought for a second that we were being abused or put in danger. And if I had been kicked off the bus just once, I am quite certain I would have been walking everyday… well, that’s not entirely true, I had a bike.