Twisted furor over schoolboy essay
Many say jailing not a case of censorship

Jonathan Kay

National Post

Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and other successful authors will meet in Ottawa tomorrow to trumpet their support for an Ontario schoolboy charged with uttering threats after he read a violent monologue in class. The fundraising event is called "Artists for Freedom of Speech." But students and administrators at the Tagwi Secondary School in Avonmore, Ont., say this case may have little to do with free expression.

The Tagwi (pronounced "tug-wuh") story, as it has been told, goes like this: Following years of abuse from bullies, the boy (whose name cannot be revealed under Canada's Young Offenders Act) read his drama classmates a story, which he titled Twisted, about a boy blowing up a school. Though the monologue was fictional, fears of a Columbine-style attack whipped the school into hysteria. Tagwi suspended the student as punishment for what he had written.

The police, who also became caught up in the hysteria, used the same justification to throw the child in jail where, owing to community fears, he was locked up for 34 days.

But interviews with students and staff members suggest that every element in this narrative -- aside from the fact the defendant read aloud a story about a boy blowing up a school -- is false.

Numerous sources, including four students in the boy's drama class who were present when Twisted was presented, report he was neither disciplined nor criticized by school officials for presenting his monologue .

"Everyone is concentrating on his class composition," says John Beveridge, executive assistant to the director of education of the Upper Canada District School Board.

"But when everything in the course of time is revealed, I'm quite confident it will be shown that the Board and those involved are getting a bad rap."

Already, the school has disclosed the boy was not suspended and the police not consulted until allegations surfaced that he made direct face-to-face threats to Tagwi students in the days following the monologue.

Three of the four criminal charges against the boy pertain to alleged death threats to specific classmates.

It also turns out the Crown had nothing to do with the boy's 34 days in jail. His bail hearing was delayed at least three times -- always at the urging of defence counsel.

And yet one newspaper article published on Jan. 8 led with the chilling words, "Writers beware -- your imagination could land you in jail," and quoted Frank Horn, the boy's lawyer, as saying: "Does this mean writers will have to worry whether they're breaking the law with every sentence they write? ... Can their imagination break the law?"

This is the purportedly the first free speech case Mr. Horn has taken; his usual trade is defending small-time criminals on charges of assault and public drunkenness.

Nevertheless, his comments have been reported widely, angering many at Tagwi, who feel their school has been unfairly maligned.

"I think it's always easier to focus on the individual who [says he's] oppressed," says Art Buckland, the Upper Canada District School Board representative for the Avonmore area. "You can imagine a defence lawyer playing up the free speech angle. He loves it."

Mary Mayer, Tagwi's principal, has denied Mr. Horn's suggestions all along. She believes because the school's account of events has gone largely unreported, the public is misinformed.

The fact is the school's decision to discipline the boy and consult police was based on an alleged pattern of direct threats -- not the content of the monologue.

The controversy might have been cut short following the boy's bail hearing, at which the Crown presented its charges. But the presiding justice of the peace, Basile Marchand, declared a publication ban, so the dozen reporters present could not publish details of the Crown's evidence.

As a result, Mr. Horn's position became the uncontested basis for media commentary and literary outrage. The Globe and Mail's lead editorial of Jan. 9 asserted that, "A 16-year-old Ontario boy has spent more than a month in jail without bail because he wrote a violent piece of fiction for a class assignment," adding rhetorically: "Since when is fiction writing a crime in Canada? ... [T]he boy has harmed no one and has apparently not uttered any threats directly."

But locals say all of this is wrong.

"This kid did not go to jail because he wrote an essay," says Cornwall Standard-Freeholder crime reporter Frank MacEachern, who broke the story of the child's arrest on Dec. 12.

"I do not think that the Crown attorney's office or school officials are stifling free speech. Some of the writers who are rallying in defence of this kid on Sunday should learn a little bit more.

"I doubt some of them would be attending this conference if they had sat in on the bail hearing."

At Tagwi Secondary School, students laugh when asked whether the defendant might be a victim of censorship. "Twisted was not the cause of the charges," says Grade 11 Tagwi student Marty Partridge, who saw the boy deliver the story in drama class.

"The text just created concern among the students. It was the [alleged] threats afterward that got the cops involved."

Tagwi has been portrayed as a hotbed of teen alienation and hysteria.

Yet, by all accounts, it is an unusually safe and collegial high school. It is in the middle of a sparsely populated rural area and many of the students are from families that know each other well.

"Everything went by the book," says Tagwi student Kristina Jackson.

"The school is getting a bad rap for hysteria but it had nothing to do with that. Principal Mayer warned [the boy] he couldn't make threats ... If something bad had happened, what would people have said then?

"I don't know where the freedom of speech issue fits in at all. It's irrelevant."

Although Tagwi students believe the boy is troubled, they also feel he has been portrayed too sympathetically by the media.

According to the teen's parents, who were quoted at length in one series of newspaper stories, the boy has been "scarred by years of abuse by the bullies he attends school with." An Ottawa newspaper called Twisted a "cry for help."

But every student interviewed disagreed with this analysis, and countered that the boy's outcast status was largely self-imposed.

His drama classmates, for example, say he sat at the back of the class, two rows behind the other students and remained there when his teacher asked him to move forward and join the rest of the class.

Tagwi student Meghan Baker, a "peer helper," says, "We'd make an effort but he didn't respond. You'd walk down the hall and he'd ignore your gaze.

"As a peer helper, my job is to try to make people feel welcome. But it's a two-way street. He [seemed to] enjoy being an outcast."

"Even if he received years and years of bullying," adds Meghan's sister Melissa, who is the school's head girl and also a peer counsellor, "he was at this school for only two months. And he was not bullied."

"He wanted to be adored for his contempt for authority," says Tagwi student and drama classmate Cory Lafave.

"And when he wasn't, he didn't know how to deal with the neglect."

Students are also skeptical of claims by the boy's family that his behaviour was precipitated by a bloody beating from a gang of 11 students a week before the Twisted speech.

None of the students interviewed learned anything of this brutal beating -- which allegedly took place on school grounds -- until after the Twisted controversy broke.

"Prior to the [controversy], we didn't hear anything," says Ian Derouchic, Tagwi's head boy.

"In a school of 500 like this, a really small school, you would hear of someone getting beaten up by 11 students.

"You'd hear about it if it were just one student. I might have seen, like, one fight in the last two years."

Tagwi's drama students are particularly offended by the suggestion the school sought to thwart the defendant's creativity. In fact, all four drama students interviewed said the boy was generally tolerated by their teacher.

In one case, all four agree, he presented a Stephen King story to class as if it were his own work.

"It was 'The Boogeyman' from the book Night Shift," Cory says.

"The stuff he was writing -- in most of it, he just used ideas from other sources."

Mr. King was presumably unaware of this when he expressed support for the boy in an interview, saying, "I am in total solidarity with that young man and admire him because it shows again that the imagination is the most powerful force on Earth ... It scares people and it has been a time-honoured custom to put people in jail or bully them because of their imagination ... But their imagination is bigger than the people who bully them."

"He's getting offers of scholarships," Kristina says. "We try so hard in school and then this guy goes and [allegedly] utters death threats and suddenly he's going to some event with Margaret Atwood."

"I wonder if she'd feel the same way if his story were about blowing up just the female students in the school?" asks another student, who declined to have his name printed.

"Our drama teacher has done nothing but support our artistic rights, our creative imagination and our freedom of speech," says Ian. "I've seen many styles of plays and scripts in our drama class, ranging from suicide to drugs use and death.

"Not once has our drama teacher ever held a student back from expressing themselves on stage or in class."

"After [the defendant] performed Twisted, [the teacher] actually complimented him for having written such a good piece," Cory says.

"And he said -- you know, in a nice way -- at least you wrote this one yourself ... One of the students in the class [then] said something mean about the script. The teacher said, 'That's wrong, you're not supposed to do that,' and he made her apologize."

Above: Ian Derouchic (left), Kristina Jackson (right)