Protect our students
Sawyer Rosenstein was twelve years old when a bully punched him in his stomach hard enough to cause a blood clot in the artery that supplies blood to his spine. Two days later, the injury paralyzed him from the waist down, permanently, in a series of events declared “incredibly rare”. There is a certain heart-tugging sympathy we feel for the boy, because everyone has experienced a bully either as a victim or an agent or a powerless onlooker, and because in our experience bullying is merely “something kids just do”, and because this time it was more than that. Imagine being confined to a wheelchair for the better part of your entire life all because of the baseless anger of a violent child. Imagine no consequences to said child’s actions (the bully in this case, who was known to be one and had a history of violence, received only a few days’ suspension) and having to look him in the eye daily from your new wheelchair you’ll never leave. Try to imagine — and this is the difficult part — whether a $4.8 million check would make that prison any better.