If conservatives hoped that the Missouri school district that saw a teenage girl brutally beat her classmate would be fair and balanced in its response to the ensuing investigation, then the recent letters passed between the school district and Missouri Attorney General should have quickly dispelled such a notion.
As local news outlet KTVI-TV reported, a viral video that depicted a fight between 16-year-old Kaylee Gain and a 15-year-old girl, whereupon the unnamed girl smashed Gain’s head into the pavement multiple times, has sparked a criminal investigation by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
According to the New York Post, Gain, a student at Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis, suffered a fractured skull and brain bleed, remaining comatose for several days before family recently revealed that she was breathing on her own.
In response to this video, Bailey launched an investigation, sending a notice of the investigation to the school district, alleging that the fight happened, in part, due to the school district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and other race-based policies.
Bailey demanded the school district turn over the records that pertained specifically to their DEI and racial equity policies, alleging that there were no longer any School Resource Officers on the scene due to a dispute over mandated DEI policies dating back to 2021.
Bailey then accused the school district of violating the Missouri Human Rights Act with its focus on DEI and so-called racial “equity.” He therefore based his investigation and demand for their records on the school’s alleged violation of the act.
Bailey’s notice, unfortunately, was marred by some factual errors, most egregiously mistakenly stating the date of the fight as March 11, when it actually occurred on March 8, after school hours at 2:30 pm.
The attorney representing the school district, Cindy Reeds Ormsby, did not hesitate to call out Bailey’s factual errors, but she then took his accusations another disturbing step further.
In the letter, Ormsby, after castigating Bailey for getting his facts wrong, accused Bailey of basing his investigation solely on attempts to politicize the disaster, by “spouting falsehoods that only serve to rile your base without complying with the Rules of Ethics to which you are bound.”
Should Hazelwood School District make changes?
After listing and debunking those points, Ormsby engaged in some good old-fashioned “whataboutisms.“
She asked Bailey a multitude of questions regarding why he never expressed similar outrage for other incidents, such as when a Jennings School District student was fatally stabbed walking home from school, or when a Normandy Schools Collaborative student attacked a teacher.
Kaylee Gain was suspended from school one day before brain damaging fight: sources https://t.co/3XcZYNDsUx pic.twitter.com/nJqBvEgGcD
— New York Post (@nypost) March 26, 2024
From there, Ormsby attacked Bailey himself, blaming his outrage here on “obvious racial bias,” alleging that “Your lack of care about the accuracy of the allegations you make, combined with your false assumptions about the security provided by the HSD could lead to the belief that you are not the attorney general for ALL Missouri citizens, but rather only for those that look and believe as you do.”
That was quite a leap in logic.
Granted, Bailey should have ensured that all his facts were correct before he sent his letter to the school district.
However, upon what did Ormsby base her conclusion that Bailey must only be making a big deal of the issue because a white girl was attacked by a black girl?
That the school district responded in this way was truly astonishing.
The fact that the school district immediately jumped to accusations of “racial bias” simply because Bailey expressed concern about this violent incident was a huge red flag.
Clearly, something broke down on a fundamental level if a teenage girl thought the solution to her issues with a fellow student was bashing that student’s head into the pavement.
Throwing these accusations of racism following the expression of concern from the attorney general will not help the situation at all.
But in today’s political climate, perhaps it was too much to expect any sort of balance from either party in this investigation.
