Have the public school officials across the country lost their ever lovin minds?
Fox43:
A Suffolk school suspended a second grader for pointing a pencil at another student and making gun noises. Seven-year-old Christopher Marshall says he was playing with another student in class Friday, when the teacher at Driver Elementary asked them to stop pointing pencils at each other.
"When I asked him about it, he said, 'Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,'" said Paul Marshall, the boy's father. "It's as simple as that."
Christopher's father was a Marine for many years. He thinks school leaders overreacted.
"A pencil is a weapon when it is pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made," said Bethanne Bradshaw, a spokesperson for Suffolk Public Schools.
The Suffolk school system has a "zero tolerance policy" when it comes to weapons. And, Bradshaw admits, that policy has tightened up in recent years because of widely publicized school shootings.
"Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community," said Bradshaw. "Kids don't think about 'Cowboys and Indians' anymore, they think about drive-by shootings and murders and everything they see on television news every day."
But Christopher's parents say school administrators failed to use common sense. Christopher has good grades and no history of being disruptive in class. They pointed out a line on the suspension notice, where the teacher wrote, "I told him to stop and he did."
"Enough is enough," said Paul Marshall. "I see it as the tail is now wagging the dog."
There is a huge a huge difference between threatening to kill other students and playing "Marine and bad guy," just as children from previous generations played cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians..... they are children for heaven sake and if our public school teachers and school officials do not have the common sense or brains to tell the difference, perhaps they should not be teaching our nation's children, nor running our nation's public schools.
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