Suspended for pointing a breakfast pastry at someone

The only reason I'm posting this is because of paragraph three.

www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/a...a94801fac_story.html

Our education system is truly, truly run by the loons.

I took kids on a field trip and one of the boys (this was middle school) had a toy gun for a GI Joe that he kept showing the teacher. I didn't understand why he was doing it and asked my boy, who explained that the teacher was obligated to suspend him for having something that looks like a gun in school. The teacher was wisely ignoring him. But a plastic rifle two inches long was sufficient grounds to send him home for three days. Apparently biting your pop tart into the shape of a pistol counts.

S.

I remember seeing the "pastry incident" in the Post when they happened. It was a real sputtering-out-her-coffee moment when I read it aloud to my wife. As for the rest of it...

Christ on a crutch... My tattered copy of SJG's Killer is one of my most treasured possessions. My best moment was managing to get into a friend's locker to leave a "bomb" [note at head height that said "this is an explosive device that triggered when you opened the locker. BOOM."] that actually got both him and another participant in the game who happened to be hanging with him and saw the note when he opened his locker. Another pair had an actual "shootout" in the halls when one pulled one of those little plastic guns that fired tiny rubber balls and misfired. The other guy had a water pistol on him [we allowed water pistols, those little rubber pellet guns, and these things that fired little plastic discs, which were great as they had pretty fantastic range] and started plugging away. Direct fire weapons and "stabbings" [jabbing with a pencil that had the word "knife" written on the side] were verboten in classrooms] were verboten in classrooms, but any between period or non-phys.ed. or band-practice open-air activity was fair game.

I'm guessing if my kid tried to play the game today the way my old crew did back then, she'd actually be arrested and/or put into mandated therapy.

Not much better in Canada. My nephew was expelled after walking away from being hit. The principal was aware that he didn't fight back, but rules are rules. Zero Tolerance is non-negotiable. I think my sisters plan is to send him to Amsterdam or Victoria with family until high-school.

This system is nuts, the Ontario government is so incompetent that it's incapable of providing basic services.

breakfast pastries are all fun and stuff until someone loses an eye. Those things are lethal.

Samoko's post fills me with rage. I don't know if I could stay civil if that happened to my kid.

Black Barney wrote: breakfast pastries are all fun and stuff until someone loses an eye. Those things are lethal.

Samoko's post fills me with rage. I don't know if I could stay civil if that happened to my kid.

Could have been worse. He got a transfer within days due to the intervention of the principal, but it's just how ludicrous the situation is. She lost confidence that the board is incapable of doing anything but maintaining its own bureaucracy at that point, so two years learning elsewhere might be worthwhile.

All you can do as a parent is accept it. Fighting the situation is useless and will only come back at the kid. Eventually something will crack and the system will get back in control, but it will be shit for a while yet.

A natural outgrowth of school being vocational instead of educational.

Really don't want to get into it here, but this is not a case of the school being ridiculous but of the ridiculous burden placed on schools. They are now in a no-win situation where if they do nothing and anything happens they get blamed, and if they do something they get blamed. We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of Newtown and teachers are still being blamed as the problem for not being SWAT commandos.

Teachers are expected to be police, counselors, nurses, babysitters, detectives, wardens, role-models, and, if they have some spare time, educators, and they're expected to do so with little pay while being called parasites and beingt old they should be happy to buy supplies out of their own pockets because that shows they have passion. If a student goes off the rails or a stranger wanders in with an assault rifle, the first question will be, "what did the school do wrong?" Their only choice is to overreact, and even then they're going to be called out for it, but at least there aren't any bodies at the end of it.

I don't know about all that, I mean everyone and everything was blamed for Newtown. Obviously not the teacher's fault. In Samoko's story, I think a little common sense would have gone a long way. If schools want to act stupid in that situation, there's no one to blame there except the school system having really dumb application of rules. At some point people should start using common sense over regulations.

Legomancer wrote: Really don't want to get into it here, but this is not a case of the school being ridiculous but of the ridiculous burden placed on schools. They are now in a no-win situation where if they do nothing and anything happens they get blamed, and if they do something they get blamed.

If a kid's a nitwit or a miscreant it's clearly the fault of the teachers and schools. Cold day in hell before I take the blame for anything of significance, so it ain't my fault my kid's a delinquent. It must be somebody else's fault. School's fault. They got the kid for 8 hours a day they better make sure he gets raised right. But hear me and hear me well: Don't you dare tell me how to raise my kids! Damn teachers.

Don't even get me started on how it's not my fault when a kid gets hurt or insulted.

Wadenels has obviously been reading my emails. Don't EVEN get me started.

OK, too late, I'm started. If a parent came to my school saying: "My kid has been scarred by the pop tart gun and now you must pay for therapy and 12 years of private education" that would be FAR FROM THE CRAZIEST THING I HAVE SEEN. Even if the school were to win in court, all our kids are in bigger classrooms because we had to let teachers go so we can afford to pay the lawyer. You people have NO IDEA!

Oh I don't think the teachers or principals are the ones to blame, hands are tied. It falls somewhere between the courts and Board of Education, which is a government issue. I imagine most teachers want to see changes more than many parents.

There's a great book called The Death of Common Sense and it has a chapter or two on the education system and how teachers are totally powerless and it's a big problem. Good read.

I have no doubt this is a school board level decision. The teachers are along for the ride like everyone else.

S.

The biggest problem is that the United States is so sue-happy that school boards all are scared and have passed rediculous zero-tolerance policies that create these sort of obnoxious decisions. Fortunately private schools are (usually) not so crazy. I'm the principal of a parochial K-8 school and have wide lattitude with these things. My public school counterparts are usually not as fortunate. I can give you some pretty bizarre and shocking stories of other cases where the punishment does not even remotely match the crime.