An Ohio woman has spoken out after her 14-year-old daughter was punished by her school for not immediately notifying school officials when she saw two classmates having sex during a class trip.
According to the Associated Press, Saundra Roundtree said that her daughter, a student at Ohio’s Dayton View Academy, changed seats with a boy who wanted to sit next to a girl during a bus trip in April. Shortly thereafter, the girl witnessed the pair having sex.
Following the incident, Roundtree said her daughter told her what happened, but said she was afraid to approach school officials out of fear of facing retribution from her classmates. After Roundtree notified the school, administrators said they would investigate.
“She was afraid,” Roundtree told Dayton CBS affiliate WHIO. “I told her, ‘Don’t say anything when you are at school. I will handle it.’”
Then, school officials told Roundtree that her straight-A student wasn’t allowed to attend their 8th grade prom and couldn’t participate in the class picnic because she failed to immediately tell school official what she saw. The two teens who had sex were later suspended, but no action was taken against the trip’s chaperones.
“They punished my daughter−who did the right thing by telling what she saw−but did nothing to the eight chaperones that were sitting in the front of the bus at the time and should have been monitoring the kids,” Roundtree told the AP. “If they are not doing anything to the chaperones, how can they punish my daughter?”
Roundtree said the 14-year-old had been looking for dresses and anticipating the prom for months. “I have to tell her today when she comes home and I already know she is going to be very upset,” she told WHIO.
Roundtree said she has contacted a lawyer to take on the case and seeks to home-school her daughter for the remainder of the school year.