Posted on 09/29/2013 3:10:32 AM PDT by markomalley
Yet another student has landed in trouble for having something that represents a gun, but isn’t actually anything like a real gun.
This time, the student is 12-year-old Joseph Lyssikatos, a student in advanced math who had perfect attendance last year. The seventh-grader made the mistake of bringing a ridiculously small, silver keychain shaped like a gun to Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School in Coventry, R.I, reports local NBC affiliate WJAR.
The two-inch keychain fell out of Lyssikatos’s backpack while he was at school.
After another kid picked it up and displayed it to other students, a teacher intervened and impounded the keychain.
Apparently fearing that the roughly quarter-sized hunk of cheap metal was somehow a danger to life and limb, school officials sprang into action. They suspended Lyssikatos for three days. He has also been banned from an upcoming class field trip.
The boy’s parents aren’t pleased.
“This boy was the one waving it or showing it to other kids. Not Joseph,” Bonnie Bonanno, Joseph’s stepmother, told WJAR. “Joseph wasn’t doing that so why weren’t both of them reprimanded?”
Lyssikatos noted that he got the tiny keychain at a local arcade with go-karts and such in exchange for 25 tickets.
School officials have clammed up concerning the incident, according to WJAR. The school released a brief statement saying: “Because this is a student discipline issue, we cannot comment on any specifics.”
Someone called a behavioral specialist at Feinstein Middle School informed the boy’s parents of the suspension. The parents say the principal and the school district superintendent won’t return phone calls.
The Feinstein Middle School handbook entitled “Serious Disciplinary Infractions” declares: “Possession/carrying/use of/threat of use of a firearm or replica shall result in a recommendation for expulsion for a period of time up to one full calendar year.”
The boy’s father, Keith Bonanno, claimed on WPRO radio that the behavioral specialist told him his son was “lucky that he didn’t get suspended for 10 days, or even worse expelled.”
According to the Feinstein Middle School website, the behavioral specialist at the school is Kim Sturdahl.
This incident marks at least the second episode during this newly-minted academic year involving school officials in the United States overreacting insanely to things that aren’t guns .
Also this week, two seventh graders were expelled from a public school in Virginia Beach, Va. for an entire school year for playing with an Airsoft toy gun on wholly private property. (RELATED: Awful: School expels kids who played with Airsoft gun on private property)
“More social engineering “
It will backfire. Now the kid(s) have an awareness of what trips them. They’ll want to know more about the forbidden fruit. They’ll clandestinely go shooting on weekends. (Problematic for kids in Chicago. They’ll have to use the alley behind their house.)
When will our society finally say, “ENOUGH ALREADY!!”?
HYHEY? HYHEY? HYHEY?
a teacher intervened and impounded the keychain.
You would think teachers who teach our children would have not only intelligence but common sense. This doesnot fair well for our children. These are agenda driven robots and nothing more
This country has lost it’s ever loving mind.
Gun Control Nazis gone insane
“Behavioral specialist”? Schools are struggling financially but they have the money to pay a busybody super nanny? Didn’t behavioral problems used to be the teacher’s responsibility?
As for the kid who was brandishing the toy, was he not “in possession”? Yes his punishment should be equal.
Feinstein Middle School — say what? Any relation?
Misleading headline and stupid of the kid to bring to modern-day school—a two-inch gun replica isn’t the size of a quarter.
But yes, of course, all this zero-tolerance of ridiculous rules is outrageous.
Whatever, besides continuously rising property taxes and dictates to send in hoards of school supplies, gives you the idea that schools are struggling financially?
Had the teacher not impounded it and it had got back to administration, the teacher probably would have also been suspended.
(But yeah, the chances are it was a hysterical liberal teacher as well.)
Really! That is just magical thinking IMHO.
There needs to be a national legal defense organization and funding to defend parents and students in situations like this. Well funding lawsuits and investigations should be used to change school attitudes and remove the anti Second Amendment zealots from the public schools.
Any such tendencies are propagandized out during their tenures at "Colleges of Education". Kind of like journalists are treated in "Schools of Journalism".
Yes. Agree. Further, it looks like it could have a working hammer and trigger. The size of it would accommodate something like a 22 short.
That said, if it is indeed just a nonfunctioning key chain, the matter should just be dropped.
The first problem is that the parents have a very bright child and they put him into a government school. Talk about a waste of talent.
There is enough information about the government schools out there. If the parents have the ability to put their children into a private school or home school and choose government schools instead, then are either complicit or terminally clueless.
Yes, it’s crazy but what is the point of calling it “quarter-sized?” That makes my pickup bicycle-sized.
I used to have a similar gun - it fired a little circular cap. Pretty sure I took it to school, and if I’d been caught I would have had it confiscated, like everybody’s water pistols.
I wonder if board games (there was a great Civil War strategy one I used to have) can have little pot metal or plastic pieces representing cannons?
Public education is the problem plain and simple... Privatization.
Back in my day, I would have been called in the office, the offending item put in a sac, and sent home with me with a note saying, “Please don’t bring this back to school”...and that would have been the end of it.
“This incident marks at least the second episode during this newly-minted academic year involving school officials in the United States overreacting insanely to things that aren’t guns “.
“School’s make the rules”. Embolden with the crown of athourity allows them to set what ever rediculous rule they choose and having focused on the removal of ANYTHING related to guns be it replicas, photos or even verbal discusions, they will jump at the first chance they get. Time for a reality check of the school boards, the school administration and the teachers who live in another world unknown to most of us. Better yet, pull your kids out of these communist indoctrination centers and home school.
I call it brainwashing of the innocent........
Policies are a great way to forego thinking and provide the policy enforcer with the wonderful excuse, “I was just following orders.”
Many times, they will back down when they get a real good FReepin’.
As long as the cockroaches think they can quietly get away with this kind of stuff, they will continue. When the light is shone on them, they tend to scatter.
“a teacher intervened and impounded the keychain.”
Brave teacher for intervening. The President will call this brave public servant to the White House, and bestow honors for selflessly risking their own life to save students.
Good thing the “gun” wasn’t the size of TWO quarters. Kid could have taken out the whole school.
The people making these decisions need to be fired. Nothing less is acceptable.
We won't. And the more of this stuff we hear, the more obvious it is that we're past the point of no return.
This is more than zero tolerance for guns in school. This is zero tolerance for the IDEA of a gun.
But in this specific area of interest I cannot blame school officials. This “one size fits all” mentality that has befallen school policy has been cause by some really bad and irresponsible “parents,” who refuse to allow school leaders to use judgment in dealing with behavior issues, and run into the principals office with a lawyer on their arm every time “Johnny” gets caught scribbling graffiti on the bathroom wall.
America is infested with parents who throw their kids in “daycare centers” as soon as the centers will take them, and when the kids are old enough to addict to TV, end up being babysat by whatever the media broadcasts. These parents know they're not doing what's best for their kids, and they're guilt-ridden over it. But, many of them are also narcissists...having been indoctrinated in public schools, themselves...so when their child gets in trouble at school and they feel that “johnny's failure's” may be a result of their bad parenting, they turn any incident into an opportunity to threaten and attack an administrator or principal for “unfairness.”
I've seen this garbage happen hundreds of times, and it's almost always the same. It's some guilt-ridden mother who, because she's put her own life and pleasures ahead of the best interest of her child, has been removed from their child's life to the point of hardly being able to remember his name. These are often “mothers” who either had “johnny” out of wedlock or are in their second, third, or fourth marriages.
This is not always the case with these ridiculous “my child is perfect!” mothers...but this little “mold” often fits, hand-in-glove.”
From the standpoint of the administrator or principal, coming under attack when you try to exercise judgment...often to prevent ridiculous over-action in cases like these...forces administrations to create “one-size-fits-all” policies, like “no tolerance” policies. I really think that in many cases school leadership would far prefer to allow seasoned and caring school leaders to use personal judgment in matters like these. But honestly, these ridiculous parents who absolutely refuse to allow administrators to see “gray area” in exercising authority and discipline force schools into this kind of rule-making.
It sickens me as it does you. But as I said, schools are to blame for a lot of “bovine excrement” with regard to dumbing-down kids, attacking societal norms, attacking faith and family, attacking academic standards...lot of things. But in these type discipline cases I'd suggest you look to bad parents as the cause of the problem. Because I can assure you that were you in the right “seat” to see what was going on behind the walls of these school administrators offices you quickly find out that “chitty parents” are the perpetrators of much of the most shocking and destructive behaviors that ever occur in a public school.
Here is my problem with the “no common sense” agenda in school......
When you have this sort of toy declared to be “dangerous”, you trivialize the meaning of the word “danger”. The kids are not stupid, and know that toy is not dangerous.
Now, let’s tell them how “dangerous” it is to take drugs or get into a car with a stranger, or put personal info on the internet. They will equate that “danger” with the “danger” of the “gun’, and we end up with dead or damaged kids.
I first noticed this trend about 10 years ago when there was a public service ad stating “what do you call someone who doesn’t recycle? Dangerous”. It infuriated me that they were teaching my grandkids that I was on the same level as a violent criminal.
With kids being suspended for drawing a weapon, I wonder when they will be suspended for carrying a Massachusetts quarter with a gun on it.
In in “Brave New World” babies were indoctrinated into certain career paths Alphas’ were encouraged to read and were at the top of the pecking order. Delta babies were shocked if they touched a book ... analogy? males are to be punished if they “do anything remotely male” ... these are sick people with power and an agenda.
Oh I dunno. Maybe it’s because all those endless pleas for increased millage on our property taxes keep going down to defeat?
Seems like absent fathers are the bigger problem in the examples you cite.
School administration is full of PCP
P ost
C olumbine
P aranoia
“Zero tolerence” = zero common sense...and a lack of discretion which would put the Soviet Gulag to shame.
what ever happened to parents going to the school and confronting the school admin!!!
Not “insanity”...
Insidious and clever. Pavolov in action.
Demonize ANYTHING to do with guns, and you automatically create the negative impression in a child’s mind, and instill a fear of punishment.
Think about it - Our children are being manipulated by psychopaths with an institutionalized political agenda...
And conditioning. Make sure the little skulls full of mush NEVER question authority. They are indoctrinated the second they attend public schools.
Glad I don't have children.
Someone needs to buy several thousand of these trinkets, and disperse them where all the kids will find them. It’d be pretty hard for the nannys to suspend the whole school.
Surpised they didn’t put the school and all surrounding schools on lockdown, call in the SWAT team and sweep the entire area.
Just to be “safe”
By this schools actions, and many others, the NEA is admitting that they are hoping to indoctrinate students to fear guns, or any mention of guns. Some of the school officials have admitted that they want to “create an attitude where students would never want to use a gun.”
Now, ask yourself why these same schools and the NEA in general DEMAND that they teach sex to younger and younger students. Right now, I believe that they are demanding the addition of sex ed, to include same sex, to kindergardeners!
Is their actions regarding guns not an admission that the opposit is true with regards to the sexualisation of children? When I mix the 2 scenarios, it looks to me like the education system is filled with pedophile perverts!
(FReepers excluded of course.)
Another reason...
There is a lot of talk about what the Founding Fathers would say about how American culture has changed if they could see it now. I am convinced that crap like this would disgust and outrage and revolt them WAY more than any other sign of cultural degradation they would come across. This is the kind of stuff that would leave many of them wondering if they really did go through all they did for absolutely nothing.
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