Posted on 06/13/2013 5:05:50 AM PDT by servo1969
This week brought more bad news for Joshua Welch, the Baltimore-area second-grader who was suspended for two days because his teacher thought he shaped a breakfast pastry into something resembling a gun.
School officials have denied an appeal to have the suspension expunged from the boy’s permanent record, reports The Baltimore Sun.
Robin Ficker, the attorney representing Welch and his family, said he will now take the matter to the Anne Arundel County school board. Under local regulations, he has 30 days to do so.
“If this school can’t educate a seven-year-old without putting him out of school, how are they going to deal with 17-year-olds?” Ficker said, according to The Sun.
Welch, who is now eight, was suspended from Park Elementary School for two days in March after he allegedly sculpted the pastry into something that maybe looked like a gun.
At the time, Welch told Baltimore FOX affiliate WBFF that his goal was to turn the prefabricated delicacy into a mountain, but that didn’t really materialize.
“It was already a rectangle. I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top of it and kind of looked like a gun,” he said.
“But it wasn’t,” the boy astutely added.
In May, Ficker met with school officials in a failed attempt to have the suspension removed from Welch’s record.
On Monday, Ficker received a letter officially denying the request. The letter came from an unnamed school district official acting as an agent of Superintendent Kevin Maxwell.
The district’s reasoning is unclear. Bob Mosier, a spokesman for Anne Arundel County schools, had no comment for The Sun.
While it seems like Joshua Welch’s spring has been pretty awful, there has been a glimmer of good news. Two months after Welch was suspended, the National Rifle Association granted him a free lifetime membership (which is worth around $550). (RELATED: Boy suspended for ‘Pop-Tart Pistol’ receives NRA lifetime membership)
Also, Sen. J. B. Jennings, a Republican who represents Baltimore Harford Counties, introduced “The Reasonable School Discipline Act of 2013.” The bill, which apparently went nowhere, was designed to curb the zeal of public school officials who are tempted to suspend students for having things — or eating things — that represent guns, but aren’t actually anything like real guns.
“The parents are “fighting back” but they are still fools if if they keep their child in public school.”
I know what you are saying but the focus should be on removing the administrators from the school not removing the kid. Running away leaves the problem in place to continue their indoctrination and harrassment. The administrators/teachers responsible for these idiotic decisions needed to be hounded out of their jobs.
It’s tempting to call this madness. It isn’t. It’s fascists controlling thoughts. The USA has already become a totalitarian country. The government doesn’t have to be overtly fascist when there are dozens of institutions already doing the fascist work for it.
Removing the administrators is a fool’s errand. The well i full of the same sort of administrators. It is almost the only kind there are. Principled administrators taking office are like Tea Party Republicans taking their seats. They are elected as conservatives but mostly take their seats as progressives and RNC Boehner yesmen..
I think you can only buy those in the mall in Erie, PA
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Millcreek_Mall_aerial_photo,_April_2005.jpg
“Removing the administrators is a fool’s errand. The well i full of the same sort of administrators.”
You are advocating what got us into this situation in the first place. As soon as an organization does something we dont like we abandon it, leaving to the leftys. Even if the replacement admins have the same mindset, they still wan to keep their jobs. Seeing what happened to their predicessor will teach them what is acceptable and what is not.
Ah, reminds me of the days when a few irate citizens would take the principal out behind the school and educate him.
Then they would have a new principal in a few days as the original one was suddenly “called away on business”.
This is at least 6 kinds of stupid. No way the school district wins this in court. Well it is Maryland....
I am a public school teacher in Virginia. I have been saying this since March of 2006 on this forum. Sadly there are certain extremists that want to see all of us hung from trees and have all the schools burned tomorrow.
Never mind that there are a number of us on this forum that strongly support Homeschooling, charter schools, etc.... that is not good enough for them.
“I am a public school teacher in Virginia. I have been saying this since March of 2006 on this forum. Sadly there are certain extremists that want to see all of us hung from trees and have all the schools burned tomorrow.”
The vast majority of families will not home school therefore the school systems will be responsible for the majority of education. Leaving the system gives the leftists free reign to indoctrinate the kids that remain. It does society little good to homeschool a few kids that then have to deal with a vast horde of new leftist voters, bureacrats, regulators, etc. We have to gain control of the mainstream education system or at least eliminate the extremists. We cant do that if we leave the field.
You cannot reform the system, not even in your own small locality. It is inherently a socialist enterprise. If you actually care for your children then you will get them out of the public schools. We raised four and we avoided public school for them. Among professional categories the one with the highest rate of home and/or private schooling for its children is public school teachers. There is a reason for that. It is certainly true in my county.
My wife is a public school teacher these last 36 years. We home/private schooled our four.
It is good that you could afford it and had that opportunity available to you. I teach in a very rural area and a very economically disadvantaged area. for most of the families in my area neither of those is an option.
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
“Afford it?” Your priorities are skewed toward having that new car every two years and the like, I think. Many families hereabouts homeschool who earn less than 30k. One family in my parish has got all four of theirs trained on musical instruments along with all the academics. There is one income and it is less than 40k. They drive a 6 year old car and do not spend on big vacations. Priorities. People who think that children are ancillary send their kids to public school or, if affluent, perhaps to private school. People who think that raising their children is the highest priority do not condemn them to public school. The parochial schools here are largely populated by nonaffluent families. People who protest they cannot afford to keep their children out of public school tend to have their heads stuffed to their waists into the cloaca of credit card debt and the like - ‘stuff’ is more important than progeny.. And that big mortgage- is it really a higher priority to have a classy house than to educate your children? Is raising a dependent socialist next generation really worth the material gains you might forego in teaching them real academics and morals and principles?
Yeah, I wonder what all of these fools thought when Obamugabe was photographed making gang signs back at some fool a while back.
Yeah, that will be a good story to tell in the gulag.
Well, where this kid goes to school is not actually Baltimore, but, apparently, the Baltimore ‘Rat infection has reached the county where he lives.
This is the deliberate policy resulting from the Gun Free School Zone Act of 1996:
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2012/12/disastrous-gun-law-sparked-school.html
That sounds like the dictionary definition of Political Correctness.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
