Andrew fields

11/30/17

In September of 2017 Sarah Sims, a mother of a fourth grader was facing felony charges just because she was trying to help her daughter catch her bullies in the act.  Sarah’s daughter was constantly complaining of her school bullies, she said she tried contacting the school but they never replied.

Sarah took matters into her own hands, she sent her daughter into school with a digital audio recorder to get audio from her classroom. Sarah is a full time student at Norfolk University so she doesn’t have the time to be on the premises. Sarah told CNN “I was appalled when I heard these charges”. She says all she wanted to do was help her daughter.

She was charged with intercepting wire, electric or oral communications.  School officials had found the recorder in her daughter’s desk and it was confiscated. The evidence that the school had was enough to prosecute Sarah. IT was worrying to her knowing that though, she could be sent to jail and lose her daughter.

On November 1st a warrant for her arrest sent out, Sarah turned herself in and she was arraigned a court date was arraigned. Sarah was able to post bond and wasn’t scheduled to have to go to court until January. Sarah’s Attorney told CNN “I was shocked to see that the school would decide to go to the police department and ultimately charge this mother as opposed to sitting her down and having just a simple conversation about what were her concerns and how the school could alleviate those concerns”.

Sarah tried saying that the recording was just an effort to make the classroom a safer environment for her daughter’s classroom. Being a full time student makes it hard for Sarah to do this for her daughter and without the schools help or even awareness of the situation she had to take the route of catching the bullies in the act. When she did this the school took up upon this action and filed charges.

Later the charges were dropped against her before her court date in January. She was relieved the charges were eventually dropped but could not believe they were filed in the first place. All Sarah wanted to do was help her daughter but the school over reacted and did something unnecessary.

If the charges were dropped it would have ended in a completely different situation. She would have ended up in court and most likely convicted. She would end up in prison and she would have been separated from her daughter and would most likely be taken from her for the rest of her life until she reaches the age of 18. It’s not difficult to see how badly this could have ended, luckily the school realized the situation and decided it was too much. The school was in the wrong her for putting the worry on this mother but it was fixed in the end.