-By Warner Todd Huston
The stupidity of our so-called schools seems never ending. Now we have a ten-year-old boy being suspended because he used his fingers and made motions like they were a bow and arrow. So, now the boy is branded as a weapons-using criminal over an imaginary bow and arrow.
This is just more of the stupidity that is the fetid “zero tolerance” policy, a rule that gives school administrators the opportunity to act like good little automatons and not be required to use their brains like adults should.
This case happened on October 14 in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania. A ten-year-old named Johnny Jones was suspended from school for shooting an imaginary bow and arrow at another kid. Apparently the school’s idiotic “no weapons” policy was evoked to get the kid thrown out of school.
Fortunately, South Eastern Middle School is being threatened with a lawsuit by the advocates at the Rutherford Institute.
“The Rutherford Institute has been called on to intervene in hundreds of cases like this involving young people who were suspended, expelled, and even arrested for violating school zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior and punish all offenses severely, no matter how minor or non-threatening the so-called infraction may have been,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. “We all want to keep the schools safe, but I’d far prefer to see something credible done about actual threats, rather than this ongoing, senseless targeting of imaginary horseplay.”
As Rutherford reports,
The incident took place the week of October 14th, when fifth grader Johnny Jones asked his teacher for a pencil during class. Jones walked to the front of the classroom to retrieve the pencil, and during his walk back to his seat, a classmate and friend of Johnny’s held his folder like an imaginary gun and “shot” at Johnny. Johnny playfully used his hands to draw the bowstrings on a completely imaginary “bow” and “shot” an arrow back. Seeing this, another girl in the class reported to the teacher that the boys were shooting at each other. The teacher took both Johnny and the other boy into the hall and lectured them about disruption. The teacher then contacted Johnny’s mother, Beverly Jones, alerting her to the “seriousness” of the violation because the children were using “firearms” in their horseplay, and informing her that the matter had been referred to the Principal. Principal John Horton contacted Ms. Jones soon thereafter in order to inform her that Johnny’s behavior was a serious offense that could result in expulsion under the school’s weapons policy. Horton characterized Johnny’s transgression as “making a threat” to another student using a “replica or representation of a firearm” through the use of an imaginary bow and arrow.
The school prohibits the act of pretend guns and other weapons so little Johnny was threatened with suspension for his playful, imaginary bow and arrow.
This is the stupidity of our so-called schools, folks.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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