Free Republic

Finally! We have common sense in our public schools, at least in one Virginia school district anyway. After two boy were suspended for “using pencils like guns“, the Suffolk School Board decided to review their current weapons policy, which was a very strict zero tolerance policy which left no room for interpretation. According to 10News.com, Under the revised policy, school administrators can look at factors such as intentions of harm and whether the object is listed as a weapon to determine the punishment. Ordinary objects will not be considered weapons A local television station reports that school board members voted...

Perhaps a suddenly firearm-friendly President Obama can put in a good word for Jared Marcum. In April, Marcum, an eighth-grader at Logan Middle School in Logan, W. Va., was arrested when he refused to take off his NRA t-shirt. The New York Daily News reports: The clothing kerfuffle began when Marcum wore a shirt bearing the NRA’s logo and a hunting rifle. As he stood in line in the cafeteria, a teacher ordered him to either change shirts or turn it inside out.Marcum declined and was sent to the office, where an officer was dispatched after he again refused to...

School officials in Calvert County, Maryland have denied a request to expunge the suspension of the kindergartener who brought a plastic cap gun on a school bus last month and then wet his pants during a subsequent interrogation. The refusal came in the form of a letter dated Friday, reports The Washington Post. The letter stated that the five-year-old “did bring a cap gun in his book bag.” It also charged that some other children were frightened and told school officials that they couldn’t discern if the orange-tipped cowboy-style gun was real or fake. The unidentified kindergartener had brought the...

The family of the 7-year-old boy from Ann Arundel County elementary school who was suspended for making a gun shape out of a pastry has tried to clear the boy’s record. This story made headlines across the country as the gun control debate has taken center stage among many elementary schools as some school administrators flex their muscles with a “zero tolerance policy” that excuses itself from common sense. But according to the Baltimore Sun school officials denied the boy’s family’s appeal on Monday, not allowing the boy’s record to be expunged of the incident. Robin Ficker, attorney for Park...

Elementary educators trying to discourage children from settling pretend beefs with pretend guns is nothing new. But in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting, and with the grownups increasingly polarized over the Second Amendment, rules for recess, on the bus and in the classroom have become stricter than ever. Some say too strict. “These zero-tolerance policies are psychotic, in the strict sense of the word: psychotic means ‘out of touch with reality,’” Dr. Leonard Sax, a Pennsylvania psychologist and family physician, and author of “Boys Adrift,” told FoxNews.com. *** “Out-of-touch policies such as these, which criminalize behaviors which have...

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill has a brilliant idea: he’s holding a toy gun exchange next Saturday in which students of the Hayward, CA school can turn in a toy gun to receive a book and a raffle ticket to win one of four bicycles. Really. Hill believes that children who play with toy guns may not think real guns are dangerous. “Playing with toy guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” he claims. Hill was inspired by a school photographer, Horace Gibson, who...

A Texas high school silenced its Valedictorian’s microphone during his speech when he diverted from his pre-approved remarks and instead spoke about the Constitution.

Liberals believe in creating institutions to solve problems. Conservatives believe the individual is better at solving problems. A 3 year-old deaf boy in Lincoln, Nebraska is being bullied by public school officials to change his name because the hand sign for Hunter Spanjer looks like a weapon. The Grand Island school district has a policy that forbids kids bringing to school "any instrument ... that looks like a weapon." They can't change the sign, because it's the official hand sign for his name, registered through S.E.E., Sign Exact English. Pressure from the National Association of the Deaf and the public...

The obvious answer here is that the last two decades' school shootings and our civilization's general moral decline have changed the equation. But while this would explain the desire to keep students with real firearms off school grounds, there is no logical reason to apply this to toy guns. Saying otherwise is like claiming that because you wouldn't trust an 11-year-old to drive the family car to school, you won't let him bring toy cars with him, either; or that he won't be allowed to possess toy airplanes because he isn't ready to pilot a 747 for Delta. The same...

OWINGS, MD -- The father of a middle schooler in Calvert County, Md. says his 11-year-old son was suspended for 10 days for merely talking about guns on the bus ride home. Bruce Henkelman of Huntingtown says his son, a sixth grader at Northern Middle School in Owings, was talking with friends about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre when the bus driver hauled him back to school to be questioned by the principal, Darrel Prioleau. "The principal told me that with what happened at Sandy Hook if you say the word 'gun' in my school you are going to...

A Canadian student in Calgary has been suspended for saving the life of a classmate from a knife-wielding bully, according to the National Post. 13-year-old Briar MacLean stepped in between an assailant, whose name has not been released, who was brandishing a knife while attacking another student. MacLean pushed the attacker away, and the bully was subdued. MacLean was thanked by the victim; the young man then went about his day at school. However, several periods later, according to both Briar and the school, he "got called to the office and... wasn’t able to leave until the end of the...

In the latest incident of anti-gun hysteria to erupt in a school setting, a kindergarten boy has been suspended from school for 10 days because he showed a friend his cowboy-style cap gun on the way to school.

Tuesday afternoon, a local elementary school student, Peter Collins, was arrested for bringing a “tornado in a bottle” to school for the annual Denysin Elementary science fair. Authorities were alerted after it was reported that a student had what appeared to be an “atmospheric weapon of destruction” on school grounds. The school was quickly evacuated, as the Denver bomb squad was called in to deal with collecting and neutralizing Collins’ second grade science fair project. Teachers close to Collins noted that Collins was a, “stellar student’ and they were, “shocked to learn someone like that could be capable of doing...

PALMER, Mass., - A Massachusetts woman said officials at her son's school have backed off plans to discipline the kindergartener for bringing a Lego gun on the school bus. Mieke Crane said she was initially told her son would have to write a letter of apology to the school bus driver, serve detention Tuesday and face suspension from the school bus for bringing the Lego gun -- which is slightly larger than a quarter -- on the bus to Old Mill Pond Elementary School in Palmer Friday morning, WGGB-TV, Springfield, Mass., reported Wednesday. "I think they overreacted totally. I totally...

My wife screamed “sick in the head” when we saw this on the local news tonight.We’ve previously covered the gun-shaped breakfast pastry and a pencil pointed like a gun.Now this:A Palmer, Massachusetts, 6-year old faced dentionand suspension, and was forced to write an apology letter for bringing a GI Joe Lego toy gun the size of a Quarter onto a school bus:[Video]Via WHDH ABC: A plastic LEGO-sized gun caused a disturbance on a Old Mill Pond Elementary School bus Friday morning.Mieke Crane is the mother of the 6-year-old kindergarten student who brought the gun on the bus.“I think they over-reacted...

In the annals of political correctness run amok in American schools, this story — if true — is easily an all-timer. A junior-high school Spanish teacher has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was fired from P.S. 211 in the Bronx in March 2012 because of a misunderstanding over the word “negro.” The non-tenured teacher, 65-year-old Petrona Smith, maintains that she was instructing her class about how to say the various basic colors in Spanish, reports the New York Post. The word “negro” naturally came up because “negro” is the Spanish word for “black.”A seventh-grade student in the class took...

This post is based in large part on an article titled Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally IllIs there a current tendency to consider those who cherish and seek to preserve our rights, including those under the First and Second Amendments, mentally ill for that reason? Interesting for the focused question it poses directly, the article should raise broader but similar questions about the current nature of academia in general. I have had no direct contact with academia since my years in undergraduate school (1959 - 63) and in law school (1963 - 66). "Back in the good old days," we were encouraged...

SUFFOLK, Va. — Two Suffolk second graders have been suspended for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.”

The liberal insanity continues… Little seven-year-old Christopher Marshall was suspended from school for holding a pencil like a gun. He was pretending to be a Marine. That’s not allowed at his school. [video] The boy has good grades and has never caused any problems in classes before. FOX 43 reported, via Legal Insurrection: A Suffolk school suspended a second grader for pointing a pencil at another student and making gun noises. Seven-year-old Christopher Marshall says he was playing with another student in class Friday, when the teacher at Driver Elementary asked them to stop pointing pencils at each other. “When...

Members of a boys 4 X 100 meter relay high school track team in Texas were left in tears last weekend after the University Interscholastic League of Texas disqualified them from competing in the state championships because the team's anchor runner made a "religious gesture" as he crossed the finish line to win their regional title. The runner, Derrick Hayes reportedly lifted a finger to the sky in celebration, as he wrapped up the win for Columbus High School. According to his father, K.C. Hayes, he was simply pointing to God. But UIL officials disagreed and slapped the team with...