View from the North 40: In a world, where teen justice reigns

A principal in West Virginia has been disciplined for plagiarizing the speech he gave to his school’s graduating seniors.

Now-graduated student Abby Smith listened to the speech Parkersburg High School Principal Kenny DeMoss gave to her graduating class and thought it sounded familiar. After she found the speech online and saw DeMoss had copied actor Ashton Kutcher’s 2013 Teen Choice Awards speech almost word-for-word, she did what modern teens know to do, she made a video and posted it on Facebook.

Smith created the equivalent of a side-by-side comparison of the two speeches, showing a few seconds of DeMoss’ speech, followed by the same section in Kutcher’s speech. This arrangement clearly showed that, aside from a few word-choice changes and addition of personal examples, DeMoss copied not only the format but also ideas, wording, a few personal details and even the style of delivery from Kutcher.

The Associated Press reported May 31 that DeMoss issued a statement denying that he did anything wrong in his May 23 remarks to graduating seniors, beyond using a little bit of formating from Kutcher’s speech.

DeMoss also commented in an email to AP that “me and my family are the only ones being hurt here. My accuser isn’t. I love kids and love this school and this will only make me better.”

Mmm-hmmm.

The Parkersburg News Central reported Tuesday that DeMoss decided maybe he wasn’t a victim after all. So DeMoss delivered a public apology to the Wood County Board of Education, and the board voted 4-1 to suspend DeMoss for five whole days. At the beginning of summer. Which is kind of like giving him an extra vacation week. Then he could go back to work.

Mmm-hmmm.

DeMoss is just lucky this incident played out like real life and not like the movies.

If this had been a movie, Smith wouldn’t have had to wait to get her video made and online after the fact. She would have pulled out her smart phone, right there while the act of plagiarism was playing out, found the video of Kutcher delivering the speech and showed the evidence to her two best friends sitting next to her.

Who could believe it without seeing it? I mean really.

Because she couldn’t have taken this blatant disregard of ethics and school policy on plagiarism anymore, she would have stood up and held her screen up toward the principal. He would, at first, have thought she was shining a light on him as if he were a rock star, then his face would turn white as he realized what he was seeing and hearing.

His first response would have been to speak louder to drown out the video while subtly signally two PE teachers to remover her to the curb. But do not fear for our heroine.

She would have stood tall, stood her ground, like an electronic-age Norma Rae, while her two friends quickly worked their technologically advanced teenager fingers and magically gotten all the other students’ phones synced up to Smith’s video.

In the rousing climax, one at a time all the kids would stand and confront DeMoss with his own words that were really Kutcher’s words, blaring back at him right there in living color.

Like in every nightmare of public speaking-gone-wrong, flop-sweat would leak through his suit, and he would cry before bolting from the stage.

In the pre-release movie trailer, the voice-over guy would say: “In a world where a trusted authority figure tries to cheat his own school’s code of ethics, one determined teen leads a band of her peers to find justice for her graduating class and to prove a link exists between being socially conscious and social-media conscious.”

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Ashton Kutcher would play the part of the principal, because there is no such thing as too much irony. I would play the school superintendent who got to fire him, because this is a straight-up summer teen movie with a simple plot line and a feel-good ending, not some artsy-nouveau-fartsy movie that ends vaguely with the principal riding a pink elephant in India for no explicable reason at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.