The details are slim and one-sided. But let’s just walk through the possibilities.
News coverage indicates that 7th grader, Ethan, was suspended from school for 2 days for twirling a pencil “like a gun.” Ethan says a classmate who was bullying him earlier shouted out “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie.”
Obviously the teacher got involved somewhere, then the principal, and the superintendent backed them up. The superintendent says that every time a student feels “threatened” it must be taken seriously. So they did.
They took it so seriously that they did a 5 hour psychological and physical evaluation on the 13-year-old. They stripped him, took blood, took urine, tested him for drugs, and had a social worker and a doctor evaluate him. At some point, the child passed out. All the tests came back clean. No evidence of drugs.
So what’s missing from the story? The school cannot comment on individual cases. So we cannot know the history of either of the children mentioned in the story. Was there bullying going on? Who usually initiated? Do either of the children have a history a misbehaving or causing trouble? These things are relevant questions.
Teachers and administrators don’t just take a normally well-behaved child from class for twirling a pencil when the class bully shouts out some accusation of “threat.”
What about the other student? If he felt so “threatened” by another kid twirling a pencil, perhaps he needed a psych eval as well.
There’s a lot of unanswered questions here and it’s doubtful we’ll ever know the whole story. But one thing’s for sure. This zero tolerance for anything that may be an imaginary gun is getting old quickly. There’s got to be a better way to identify potentially dangerous children. Kids are smart. They will learn to use this fatal system flaw to their advantage. It sounds like that’s what the alleged bully did, in this case getting his rival suspended.
You can watch the news report here. Let me know what you think!
Photo credit MS Office ClipArt
