One of my students has responded to our post about the second grader suspended for drawing a water pistol with this anecdote:
At my high school a classmate of mine was suspended for two weeks and expulsion was pending an administrative hearing for having spent shotgun shells in the bed of his pick up truck. He was not expelled but did have to wait for the hearing to determine that. What sense did that make? Spent shot gun shells can't hurt anyone. There was no gun and the only crime he was guilty of was not being neat enough to clean out his truck before going to school.
Perhaps there was more to this than what the student who relates it was aware, perhaps not. But if not, it's hard to think of words to express the utter mindlessness of the school officials who suspended this boy. It is as if their job requires them to be little more than unthinking machines or zombies who have no ability to actually reason their way through particular cases. A zero tolerance policy regarding firearms means to them that anyone who brings to school anything at all associated with a weapon faces suspension.
A spent shotgun shell, though, is no more a threat to someone than is a photograph of a gun in a magazine. I wonder if the school library has purged from its shelves every copy of Outdoor Life or other magazines likely to carry ads for guns. I wonder if students are allowed to wear membership patches for the NRA or Izaak Walton League on their clothing. I wonder if the boy had had a hammer or baseball bat in his truck, far deadlier implements than an empty shotgun shell, whether he would have faced a two week suspension.
These questions, however, would only occur to rational individuals to ask, and that appears to be a cohort in which school administrators are becoming increasingly uncommon.
RLC
