Engaging in commerce

After expelling a female student for “intolerable” behavior, school teachers at a commercial school in Nakhon Sri Thammarat are living in fear for their lives following the girl’s return accompanied by a gang of young thugs, who smashed windows and threatened to kill every teacher in the school. The contretemps started when one of the teachers overheard a girl student discussing with another whether or not she should lower the price she had been charging clients for her sexual favors. Prostitution not being one of the majors offered at the school, the teacher decided that it was inappropriate for the girl to be establishing a pricing strategy for her assets in this way and reported the student, in the second year of the school’s lower-certificate program, to school supervisors. They, in turn, prepared a note for the girl’s parents, requesting their presence in a meeting to discuss their daughter’s wanton behavior. They made the mistake, however, of asking the young hooker to deliver the message to her parents. When the day of the meeting arrived the girl appeared with some adults she had dragged in off the street who were clearly not her real parents. The school administrators therefore gave her another letter – this time an expulsion notice citing “intolerable behavior”. This enraged the girl, who on August 8 returned to the school with a band of about 20 friends, male and female, none of them students at the school. They marched in, armed with wooden sticks, smashing school property and trying to assault the teacher who had issued the expulsion notice. Before leaving, they said they would return to “kill every teacher in the school”. They did return the next day and – although the promised massacre did not take place – they continued to issue threats. Later, a truancy officer from Nakhon Sri Thammarat Educational Area 1 office said that the school had requested “a force” of officers to come to the school after the initial rampage, but that they were too understaffed to do anything when the gang returned. He said it was up to the school staffers themselves to decide whether to press criminal charges against the girl, but added that he “understood” that the teachers were too afraid for their own safety to do so. “After all, they have to come to the school every day on public roads and something bad could happen,” he said.