If you read the other post about the police call, you know how it ended up. But the call didn't come out of nowhere — there was a lot that happened before it. This is that part.
The laptop situation
I have ongoing hand pain and had an Occupational Therapy referral because of it. My laptop was a Reasonable Adjustment — meaning the school was supposed to accommodate it, not take it away. They confiscated it anyway. More than once.
When your main way of doing work gets taken from you repeatedly and nobody seems to care that there's a reason you need it, it stops feeling like a school and starts feeling like somewhere that's actively working against you.
The SEND document
At some point I came across a file on the school's network containing sensitive SEND information about other students. I didn't hack anything. I didn't use any special access. It was just sitting there on a drive that was openly accessible to everyone — students and staff alike.
I recorded a video showing exactly how I navigated to it using completely normal student access, and I saved both the video and the document to my school OneDrive so that staff could see both the breach and the route to it. The intention was to report it. To show them there was a problem. That's it.
The Hostinger webmail
After one of the laptop confiscations, I had no way to communicate with my mum during the school day. My usual tools were gone. So I used my personal Hostinger webmail — my own email on my own domain — to get in touch with her.
This was raised with the school at the time. They knew exactly why it happened and what the context was. Months later it resurfaced as an allegation of using an "obscure mail server to communicate externally." That's the same incident, just reframed completely.
The USB drive
A member of staff confiscated my USB drive in the library and accused me of using it to run programming tools. They asked me to plug it in. It didn't work — because it was broken, and I'd been using it as a fidget object. They confirmed it didn't work. Then told me they were "watching me."
That incident also ended up in the list of things passed to the police as a technical concern.
The three-hour interrogation
One Friday, I was pulled into a room with the head of IT, pastoral staff, and others. They took my phone, my laptop, my mouse, my headphones, and my chargers. They kept me there for three hours without letting me go get lunch. I'm autistic. I'm selectively mute. And they just… did that.
The pattern
Looking back at all of it, there's a pattern. Every single thing I did that could be framed as a technical concern got framed that way — even when there was a completely reasonable explanation, even when the school already knew the context, even when the incident was their mistake in the first place.
The SEND breach was their misconfigured file permissions. The webmail was their confiscation of my laptop. The USB was a broken fidget toy. And somehow all of it got packaged up and sent to the police as evidence of wrongdoing.
I'm not at that school anymore. I'm being home educated now. And I'm still figuring out how to talk about all of this — which is partly why I'm writing it down here.