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.
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