JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

A few weeks ago a man and woman walked into a lawyer's office in Fayetteville. They told of how their 16-year-old son had been beaten regularly for years by other school kids. They said these beatings sometimes required medical attention.

They asserted that school officials in Fayetteville never seemed to do anything. To their knowledge, no assailant had ever been suspended, much less referred to the police.

What might this lawyer, Wes Doss, be able to do for these parents, Curt and Penny Wolfe?

More to the point, what might he be able to do for their boy, Billy? He was a gangling kid with a learning disability about whom other kids had written vile and threatening things on the Internet. He had been clobbered and bloodied at a school bus stop, on a school bus and in a classroom.

Doss wasn't sure what he could do, other than, for the moment, get in under the statute of limitations on one of the more vicious assaults.

He filed a civil assault complaint -- "just to have it sitting there," he said -- against the student allegedly delivering that beating. He also named "John Does," meaning unidentified students who allegedly kept Billy from escaping the room where the beating took place.

He wasn't looking for damages. He was looking for leverage to protect this boy.

This lawsuit turned out to be quite a big thing.

You see, the filing did not simply sit there. "It has taken on a life of its own," Doss says.

The local press picked it up and published an article. A writer for The New York Times, whose job is to go around the country seeking and telling dramatic human stories, read the report. He came to Fayetteville and interviewed the parents and Billy and school officials.

The disturbing article -- one-sided, school officials complain -- was published Monday in the Times. By 7:45 a.m., Bobby New, the Fayetteville superintendent, had been inundated with e-mails from around the world expressing horror that such things could happen and that the school couldn't or wouldn't stop them.

New got an e-mail from an American in China saying he couldn't possibly encourage educational exchange programs for Chinese youth if the American schools couldn't protect a troubled kid from what amounted to terrorism.

By that afternoon, Doss and the family had been booked on ABC's "20/20" and the "The Today Show" on NBC.

The story reportedly goes back to middle school, when Billy got a call from a classmate taunting him by asking if he wanted to buy a sex toy. Billy told his mother, and his mother told the caller's mother.

Thus Billy became known as a mommy's boy, a prude and a nerd. He got called homosexual, though there isn't any indication of that. His physique didn't exactly deter bullies.

School officials know that Billy has been attacked. They say they've dealt diligently with these incidents. They seem to suggest there might have been more to some of them than we know and that perhaps Billy doesn't always exhibit the personality that can evade or deflect trouble.

What school officials had best never say is that anyone asks to be beaten.

New tells me he can assure these parents that the school has acted responsibly in the interests of their son's safety. But he says he simply can't prove that, because student records are private by federal law.

Still, very little can be said to excuse a school district for physical attacks on a student over three or four grades, even if the victim might not have been always altogether passive and even if, yes, bullying has been a horrid part of school life since the first school opened.

Billy Wolfe may remain alienated at the bus stop or on the bus or at school. In fact, having mom and dad go to a lawyer and the newspaper will make that alienation even worse, if possible.

But he's no longer alone.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.