GUILDERLAND — The board of education heard this month from retired State Trooper Peggy Christman about an incident that happened just before Thanksgiving: She said that two high-school students approached her 15-year-old nephew, whom she declined to name, as he waited outside the school for an afternoon bus, grabbed his expensive headset, and played “monkey-in-the-middle” with it, eventually “stomping” on it.

“I do not want the victim to be under the impression that you can have your possessions destroyed and you just have to accept it,” Christman said at the meeting.

This week, high-school Principal Thomas Lutsic said that the incident had been investigated and that school officials had acted appropriately. “People have confrontations, but they’re not all bullying,” he said.

Lutsic said, “We are deeply concerned about the safety of our kids. We investigate things very, very thoroughly. We did with this one, too. But we’ve got to go by what we find out in our investigation and act appropriately for that.”

The boy’s mother maintains the school has changed its posture from its initial investigation, in which a student was punished, to its current stance, after further investigation, that it was “horseplay.” She says she was told by a school official, back in November, that a boy had admitted wrongdoing.

His family’s view

Christman, who retired from the New York State Police after 26  years as a Trooper, said her nephew was waiting outside after dismissal for the afternoon bus to come, talking with a student he knew from the bus, when two students he did not know approached and started to play a game of “monkey-in-the-middle” with an expensive headset that he wears.

One student took it, she said, and threw it to the other. It fell to the ground and one of them stomped on it, she said.

Her sister, the boy’s mother, made several calls to school officials and the school resource officer, she said, which went unreturned.

Christman, who said she lived in Guilderland for many years but recently moved to East Berne, told the board that she did not want her nephew to feel that people could simply take his possessions and destroy them and not face any punishment.

She listed the things she would have liked to see happen:

— The bullies made to apologize to the victim;

— The school require restitution; and

— The bullies required to undergo training in “the destructiveness of bullying.”

Christman said on the phone last week that her nephew wears the headset so he can listen to music, particularly when he is sitting alone in the cafeteria at lunchtime.

The boy’s mother says she has now been told by an assistant principal that just one boy was involved in “normal horseplay” and that other kids had said her son sometimes pokes kids with the microphone from his headset. He would never do that to someone he didn’t know, and he did not do that that day, she said.

The Enterprise is withholding the complainant’s name because he is a minor.

School’s view

Lutsic said that he could not comment in any detail about the incident, due to concerns for students’ privacy. “We’ll say it has been investigated, and the student has been disciplined,” he said.

He also said that school officials cannot compel a parent to make restitution to another parent, as the boy’s family had wished.

He said that it was “a small microphone” that got stepped on, and not the headset itself. Lutsic said, “The mouthpiece fell on the ground and got stepped on and broken.”

Lutsic said, “People have confrontations, but they’re not all bullying.”

The principal said that the mother [of the 15-year-old boy] came in and met with the assistant principal, and that “then we never  heard from the mother.”

The mother was surprised to learn that the principal had said that. She that, from her perspective, school officials had not been very helpful.

She said, “If anything happens to my kid again, I’m going to be back at school, and I’m not going to give up next time.”