The Associated Press today reported that sixth-grader Ashley Smith was suspended for 10-days from her suburban Atlanta school for bringing a Tweedy Bird wallet to school. Why? The wallet meets the school’s definition of a weapon.
The 11-year-old Smith runs a web site devoted to Tweedy Bird so naturally the Tweedy Bird wallet was a given. Unfortunately for Smith the wallet contains a chain inside it which is designed to hold keys. The chain is just over the 10-inch limit the school imposes on chains, and so they sent her home for 10 days for bringing a weapon to school.
This reminds me of a case a couple years ago where a student was expelled for assaulting a school official. Certainly he deserved severe punishment for that, but more interesting was what started the argument that led to the fight. Security officials at the school noticed what they thought was a gun under the driver’s side seat of the car. They pulled the student out of class and had him unlock the car. Sure enough there was a gun under the seat — a toy gun left in the car by the student’s much younger brother.
At which point the school official informed the student that he was suspended for several days because the school has a zero tolerance policy against bringing even toy guns on school premises. Again, violence is always wrong but if somebody at the university told me I was suspended without pay from my job because my daughter left a toy gun in my car, things would get very heated.
Some schools are taking this even further. Another story that hit national wires recently was the case of several young children suspended from school for playing cops and robbers. They didn’t have toy guns, but they did shape their hands into guns and yell “bang bang,” etc., at each other. The school kicked them out saying that making your hand like a gun and saying “bang” constituted a death threat and was a big no no under the zero tolerance policy.
After thinking about both cases, one thing really bothers me about these sorts of cases — don’t you wish that some of these schools put as much effort into teaching kids to read, write and learn math as they do in kicking them out under these absurd zero tolerance rules? I remember playing “Battlestar Galactica” and “Star Wars” on playgrounds as a kid — today I guess they’d probably have read my friends and I the riot act before kicking us out.
Source:
Girl suspended for Tweety chain. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.