MAUREEN CALLAHAN: A girl bullied to death – and her grieving dad smeared by HER school! From suicide, to rape, to gender madness… America’s kids are in crisis – betrayed by woke adults
Where have all the adults gone?
To watch the video of 14-year-old Adriana Kuch being brutally assaulted in the hallway of her own high school — to see her crouching in the fetal position as she’s swarmed and dragged and pummeled by three other students while another student off-camera yells, ‘F**k her up! F**k that b*tch up!’ — is to see the confidence of bullies in present-day America.
Once upon a time, kids like this would attack off-campus, in secret, no witnesses. Now they attack openly in cafeterias and classrooms, school buses and social media, secure in the knowledge that administrators won’t do a thing.
After Kuch was assaulted — and it took 40 seconds for an adult to intervene, these brazen kids punching away regardless — her attack was posted on social media: TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram.
Two days later, Adriana committed suicide. A message sent just hours before mocked her for ‘dripping’ blood and getting ‘whooped.’
This poor young girl already had a host of stressors and risk factors — her mother, who battled addiction, had died when she was little, and her father had been concerned about Adriana vaping marijuana. But it seems that this beating, and the endless social media humiliation that followed, broke her young spirit.
‘She was so embarrassed that they jumped her,’ said her father, Michael Kuch. ‘She would say, ‘I don’t want to be made fun of.’ It was like she was attacked twice. It used to be you’d go to school, get bullied and then you left. But now you come home and you keep getting bullied — they still keep picking at you at home.’
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the school suspended the bullies involved but did not call the police. Instead, Michael Kuch brought his daughter – beaten and bloodied – to the police station himself.
After Kuch was assaulted — and it took 40 seconds for an adult to intervene, these brazen kids punching away regardless — her attack was posted on social media: TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram.
After Adriana’s suicide made headlines, the school superintendent, Triantafillos Parlapanides, posted to social media that in this case, ‘there are two sides to every story.’
This is an adult entrusted with the education and care of teenagers? This is appalling. No wonder bullies at his school beat and crush and slap and insult with impunity. No wonder the bullied feel even more helpless — the adults in charge won’t stand up for the victims!
On Friday, the day of Adriana’s wake, Parlapanides sent a series of emails to DailyMail.com in which he seemed to blame Adriana and her father for this tragedy. Responding to a question about whether the school had offered Adriana any services — as it’s believed she had been bullied for quite some time before her suicide — this craven, blame-shifting, cowardly deflector wrote: ‘After her mother’s suicide since her father was having an affiar [sic] at the end of her 6th grade. Her father married the woman he had an affair with and moved her into the house. Her grades and choices declined in 7th and 8th grade. We offered her drug rehab and mental services on 5 occasions but father refused every time.’
Wow. The fish, as they say, rots from the head. This guy should be fired immediately and never allowed to work with children again. He violated Adriana’s private health information and essentially blamed her father for her mother’s suicide.
As of Thursday, the four girls allegedly involved in the attack at New Jersey’s Central Regional High School have been charged; three with fourth degree assault, and one with disorderly conduct. Prior to that, her father said, the school did next to nothing: No investigation. No monitoring of social media.
It’s fair to assume that Central Regional, like far too many schools across America, has no real rules against cyber-bullying. Why would they? There’s no federal law against it, even as the CDC reported in October 2022 that one in five high school students reported being bullied on campus the previous year. More than one in six reported cyber-bullying. Self-reports are highest in middle schools at 33%, then high schools at 30%.
Where are our educators? Our administrators? Our elected officials?
Make no mistake: Cyber-bullying among children and adolescents is a public health crisis, just as the angry young American male is, just as the school shooter is, just as the post-COVID learning and socialization gap is, just as the woke orthodoxy that every boy or man who questions their gender should have access to women’s and girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, shelters, prisons — whether or not girls and women feel safe — is as well.
In May of 2021, a 15-year-old boy raped a female classmate in a trans-friendly school bathroom. He assaulted that young girl in a bathroom stall. A teacher later testified that she saw two pairs of feet under the stall door but did nothing.
On Friday, the day of Adriana’s wake, Parlapanides (above) sent a series of emails to DailyMail.com in which he seemed to blame Adriana and her father for this tragedy.
Michael Kuch brought his daughter – beaten and bloodied – to the police station himself.
Did nothing! Scott Smith, the girl’s father, said she had been held down on the floor and attacked in that stall. Why was a grown teacher afraid to knock? To yell ‘What’s going on in there?’ Or ‘Get out of there now and let me see what you’re doing!’?
That school superintendent, Scott Ziegler, also did nothing. In fact, he claimed there was no record of that assault — or a similar sexual assault committed by the same boy, against another teenage girl, later that same year in another Virginia school.
For agitating for justice, for demanding that the school board tell the truth about sexual assaults in girls’ bathrooms and what transgender policy may have to do with them, Scott Smith was arrested at a school board meeting, dragged on the ground till his shirt rolled up to his chest, winding up with a bloody mouth.
Humiliated.
That’s what fathers standing up for young female students in America get today — shamed as anti-trans, bigots, MAGA or MAGA-adjacents, idiots who can’t comprehend liberal nuances.
Michael Kuch, speaking out after his daughter was bullied and committed suicide, gets smeared by the school superintendent, who took it upon himself to air their private family matters.
And look at the non-coverage of whistleblower Jamie Reed in much of liberal media. Here is a 42-year-old who identifies as ‘a queer woman, politically to the left of Bernie Sanders’ — married to a trans man — who worked for four years at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
She’s the first American gender clinic worker to come forward and say children are being harmed by medical gender transition.
You would think her explosive essay, published yesterday in the Free Press, would make headlines everywhere. Not so, despite her dire warnings.
‘She was so embarrassed that they jumped her,’ said her father, Michael Kuch. ‘She would say, ‘I don’t want to be made fun of.’
‘What’s happening to children,’ Reed wrote, ‘is morally and medically appalling.’ With little more than claims of gender confusion and two visits with an in-house therapist, these children, she says, are placed on puberty-blockers that can result in lifelong sterilization or increased risks for cancer or who knows what — because we have no longitudinal studies. The teenagers Reed saw, most of them virgins, were approved for surgeries that many come to regret. They had no idea what their minds and bodies were in for, but they trusted the adults at this facility.
Reed reprinted an email from one angry parent:
‘Please be advised that I’m revoking my consent for this course of medical treatment. Grades have dropped, there’s been an in-patient behavioral health visit and now he’s on five different medications . . . [Redacted] is a shell of his former self, riddled with anxiety. Who knows if it’s because of the hormone blockers or the other medications. I revoke my consent.’
For alerting us to this public health emergency, Reed says she expects to be shamed and unemployable. ‘I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk,’ Reed wrote. ‘Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so.’
The children of America need more adults like Jamie Reed and Michael Kuch and Scott Smith: Willing to stand up for the most vulnerable, the most at-risk, to push back against this ultra-woke world in which black and white, right and wrong, are increasingly archaic ideas. We cannot abide bullies, be they kids in class or teachers who look the other way or school shooters whose aberrant behaviors give plenty of warning — our most recent a six-year-old who intentionally shot his teacher — or trans activists who equate concern and questioning with prejudice and hate.
We are failing our children. It’s long past time for the adults in the room to grow up.
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