What happened to actually talking to people?

My niece got in trouble at school for threatening to break a kids arm. They are in Kindergarten and she’s madly in love with this boy. Instead of having her go tell the boy she was sorry, the teacher made her write him a letter telling him how sorry she was. My daughter had to do this last year when she squeezed a boy and held him down while other kids threw balls at him these kids sound like thugs It’s bad enough that adults don’t talk to each other so much anymore what with email and texting, but we’re teaching our kids this too? To me it seems like it would be better to make the kid verbally apologize than write a letter and hand it to the teacher who in turn will hand it to the “victim”.