In a wild turn of events, a Texas high school teacher has decided to turn to authorities over the allegedly egregious situation concerning one of her missing desk decorations.

In what some have called a modern revival of the school-to-prison pipeline, this teacher has posted a slew of public videos of herself on the social media platform TikTok, baselessly accusing her young students of stealing a Hello Kitty Funko Pop figurine from her desk. According to the New York Post, which has identified the instructor as “Ms. Dawson,” the teacher had placed the toy on her desk at the beginning of the school year and within a month it went mysteriously missing. The toy is said to have held a great deal of sentimental and monetary value to the teacher, as it was gifted to her by a former student several years prior.

Dawson has insisted that the escalation of this situation is meant to be a hard lesson for what she calls “the principle,” explaining her thought process by saying that “[i]f kids think it’s okay to steal from teachers, what comes next?”. She goes on in her lengthy series of TikTok videos about how she hopes to make an example out of this student. Many netizens have criticized her behavior, pointing to her own mistakes and responsibility surrounding her action of placing such a valuable item in a public place where it had high chances of being stolen. Regardless of which side you are on, surely we can all agree that TikTok is not the best way to handle such sensitive professional matters, unless one’s purpose is to exacerbate the issue and surrounding emotions.

This kind of harsh anti-rehabilitative punishment for schoolchildren is not something one would expect to see, especially coming from a Black woman in America. In some ways, it could be fair to see the punishment match the crime, especially in cases such as theft, but schools are meant to be places of learning, not retribution.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union website, “at-risk children” are continually being pushed out of schools and into prisons by zero tolerance policies and the lack of proper mental health counseling resources, a problem which has been longstanding in this country.

What do you think would be the proper course of action in a situation like this? Should there be more accountability for the misbehavior of students in the public school system and who should be responsible for enforcing this accountability?