We said “No talking”!

A local school board got pretty upset at a reporter because he dared to talk to people in places other than where he was authorized to.

The Martinsville Daily quotes the Henry County Schools news release as saying, among other things, that Hays Burchfield, a reporter at the Martinsville Bulletin, “was at Bassett High School talking with students without their consent and in unauthorized areas.”

Without their consent? How do you talk with someone without their consent?

And the reporter also “interfered with the administration’s ability to respond to a bomb threat at Magna Vista High School.”

Sounds bad — maybe you picture him preventing a search or getting in the way of police. In fact, when you read the full story you find that his means of “interference” was talking to students outside (and behind) the school when the administrators wanted him in front.

Of course, there’s a good argument to be made that the administrators had to spend extra time talking to Burchfield when they should have been searching for a bomb. But “interfering”? Please.

How does this read? That you’ve got a bunch of school administrators used to ruling with absolute power getting fed up with a reporter who was ignoring their absolute authority.

For whatever reason, they didn’t want him talking to students, and they seemed quite happy to build mountains out of molehills to make a case for keeping him away.

I wonder what he was working on that got them so worried.