After 8th grader threw water on Blue Valley school board candidate, she filed charges | Opinion
Aaron Lundy and his friends in the eighth grade at Oxford Middle School in Overland Park have taken a keen interest in the upcoming Blue Valley school board elections, for one thing because they see services they need on the line.
“My son is part of the LGBTQ+ community,” his mom, Sarah Streets, told me, “as are many of his friends. Most of them are utilizing mental health support regularly,” in Aaron’s case to manage his ADHD, and they “value the ability to safely exist in their schools and communities as they are.”
At a school event called the Friday Night Club on Oct. 6, Aaron and his buddies noticed that school board candidate Trisha Hamilton, part of the “Blue Valley Excellence” slate of candidates who want to cut those programs, was there in her campaign T-shirt.
Hamilton, a candidate associated with “Moms for Liberty,” also sees “gender ideology, critical race theory and other divisive, non-academic concepts” as big problems in schools, along with “sexually explicit” books.
Aaron and his friends, Streets said, “feel that Mrs. Hamilton is a threat to those freedoms” and programs they count on. Which explains, though no one thinks it excuses, what happened then.
“We started joking around about doing something to prank her,” Aaron, who turned 14 on Thursday, told me in a separate conversation. “Throwing water on her was brought up. And I don’t know why,” he said with a sigh, “but I said I would do it.”
He did, too, yelling “Trans Lives Matter!” as he emptied his water bottle.
So how did she react? “I don’t really know, because I got scared and ran away,” with her briefly in pursuit.
For a minute, he was able to hide in between two doors, “but I felt bad,” so he surrendered to the assistant principal. “I apologized, obviously, because that was a mean thing to do. I said, ‘That was immature,’ and she said, ‘Yes, it was.’ I think being angry is a natural reaction to having water thrown on you.”
Then Aaron was led off to the principal’s office, and before he even got there understood why he was being suspended for two days.
“He has never had a history with behavior challenges, aggression, fighting, or inappropriate behavior toward a teacher or administrator,” said his mom, “so it was a shocking phone call to receive that I needed to come pick him up.”
Overland Park police case to be heard in youth court
Since Hamilton, a mom of three and the business administrator for her church, Lenexa Baptist, didn’t respond to the detailed message I left on her cellphone, all I know about her reaction is what I see in the Overland Park police complaint she filed the following Monday.
The whole incident was captured on video by cameras in the school, and Aaron immediately said that he was guilty. He has been charged with battery, but that charge will be heard before a “youth court” — a diversion program Aaron is very familiar with as a volunteer. His sentence of community service will be handed down by trained peers.
After thinking about it for the last month, his family is only sharing what happened because they keep hearing that Hamilton may be exaggerating the incident to voters, and “using the incident” in her campaign, said Streets, “never mind that what she stands for was causing distress in young queer kids, and never mind that she is seeking to remove the very resources that enable them to make it through their school experience with safety and confidence that people care about them and have their backs.”
“In our home, we have not taken the incident lightly,” she added. Aaron “understands the boundary that he inappropriately crossed while trying to make his statement.”
But, she said, the lack of impulse control that comes with ADHD “is one of many reasons why mental health support is such a huge and important issue to me and many families in this district. I do not believe you can separate mental health support from discipline when it comes to children with developing brains.”
Hamilton knows all about still-developing brains, which she mentioned twice in a recent debate as the reason that kids can’t handle “sexually explicit” books.
Strengthened mental health counseling after suicides
Streets and her husband, who is a counselor, “have been working with Aaron to come through this with a balance of understanding what he did was unquestionably wrong, and coaching on what different choices can be made moving forward so we don’t have an incident of this nature happen again.”
Counseling services in the district were strengthened significantly several years ago, after an increase in suicides. Hamilton and others on her slate see mental health as important, but the responsibility of families rather than schools.
Cuts in those services could lead to a lot worse than some water being thrown.
And though I don’t agree with those proposed cuts, or any of the rest of Hamilton’s agenda as a candidate, my main takeaway is to wonder why someone who is running on a commitment to “listen and learn” hasn’t tried to sit down with Aaron, hear his perspective and share hers.
“I’d prefer that,” he said when I suggested that maybe they just needed to have an old-fashioned face-to-face conversation. “I think she was just trying to make a statement” by filing charges. Which by criminalizing immaturity and adding a highly elective case to our already overburdened criminal justice system maybe was “a bad way to handle it, but I can’t really talk.”
He didn’t “properly protest,” and if he had it to do over again, “I’d just leave her alone.”
Aaron Lundy comes across as a sweet kid, open and thoughtful.
While watching Trisha Hamilton in a debate and listening to her podcast conversation with several other Christian moms who are running for school board, she struck me as a sincere and committed person whose views I just don’t happen to share. She seems like someone who really is running to serve.
Those who disagree talk less and less, which obviously only hardens our divisions, solving nothing.
Whatever sentence Aaron receives on Nov. 14, and whatever happens in Tuesday’s election, what a missed opportunity it would be if these two only met in youth court.
This story was originally published November 3, 2023 at 5:04 AM.
