OFFICIALS at an Arizona school have suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.
The boy’s parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.
“The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good,” said the boy’s mother, Paula Mosteller.
The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said.
The East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he did not intend the picture to be a threat.
Administrators of Payne Junior High in nearby Chandler suspended the boy on Monday for five days but later reduced it to three days.
The boy’s father, Ben Mosteller, said that when he went to the school to discuss his son’s punishment, school officials mentioned the seriousness of the issue and talked about the 1999 massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, where two teenagers shot and killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves.
Mr Mosteller said he was offended by the reference.
Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was “absolutely considered a threat,” and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.
I would never have finished school in modern times. I used to sketch guns, some shooting bullets, some not. Little scenes of army men blowing varieties of things up with a variety of weapons. Planes and helicopters were dropping bombs, diving, getting shot down, gunning down armies and all sorts of “evil” stuff.
I never had the urge to fire a real gun during these times, they were just fun to sketch… Stifling the imagination when something is clearly not a threat is just ludicrous. If that sketch was coupled with other behaviors and statements then maybe, but if it’s just a sketch it’s sad.
I would never have finished school in modern times. I used to sketch guns, some shooting bullets, some not. Little scenes of army men blowing varieties of things up with a variety of weapons. Planes and helicopters were dropping bombs, diving, getting shot down, gunning down armies and all sorts of “evil” stuff.
I never had the urge to fire a real gun during these times, they were just fun to sketch… Stifling the imagination when something is clearly not a threat is just ludicrous. If that sketch was coupled with other behaviors and statements then maybe, but if it’s just a sketch it’s sad.
In P6 we used to draw stick figure armies kicking seven bells out of each other. And the whole bloody year did it- hundreds of stick figures blowing each others up with guns, bombs, planes, tanks and various horrible things.
I would never have finished school in modern times. I used to sketch guns, some shooting bullets, some not. Little scenes of army men blowing varieties of things up with a variety of weapons. Planes and helicopters were dropping bombs, diving, getting shot down, gunning down armies and all sorts of “evil” stuff.
I never had the urge to fire a real gun during these times, they were just fun to sketch… Stifling the imagination when something is clearly not a threat is just ludicrous. If that sketch was coupled with other behaviors and statements then maybe, but if it’s just a sketch it’s sad.
Same here for me, I would have been permanently removed from school for all of my gun and knife drawings. You have to love no tolerance rules. No tolerance means no thinking.
Sue the school for wrongfull whatever. A clever attorney can make something out of it. If only to warn schools not to overreact so stupidly.
No wonder kids have less and less respect for teachers who behave like morons.
And otherwise non-moron teachers should take action against thes discipline undermining fools.
They are a disgrace for normal teachers.
Sue the school for wrongfull whatever. A clever attorney can make something out of it. If only to warn schools not to overreact so stupidly.
No wonder kids have less and less respect for teachers who behave like morons.
And otherwise non-moron teachers should take action against thes discipline undermining fools.
They are a disgrace for normal teachers.
That’s not the only reason.
Most schools now tend to focus more on unnecessary things, and punish students who don’t follow more harshly then punishing students who do something much more serious.
A lot of teachers in the school’s I’ve been to cannot control the class, a teacher isn’t even aloud to touch a student without it being considered child abuse.
I know it was a long time ago, but some of the stuff I did at school would put me behind bars today!
For example, once in a particularly dull lesson I was staring out of the window when the teacher, somewhat unkindly, snapped, “Beckham, stop staring into Michelle Williams’[*] eyes and pay attention!”
Needless to say, one particular clique of girls decided that it would be fun to continually tease Michelle about my apparent interest. I didn’t think this very fair, so I wrote an (tasteful) erotic poem pointing out the many alluring features of Janine Buchanan (the ringleader) in moderately amorous terms, which I proceeded to read out in English class.
Outcome Then:
The poem “Janine” became a minor school smash, Janine retreated, red-faced, to the girls’ toilets immediately after the lesson and wouldn’t come out for the rest of the day, and I got an ‘A’ for the poem. I also started going out with ‘Michelle’ a few weeks after.
Outcome Now:
Janine reports me to the Headmaster, who calls the police, who interview me for several hours regarding my ‘stalking’ another student. I am eventually put on sex-offenders register, and Michelle doesn’t ever go out with me because I’m a “pervert”. I grow up ostracized and bitter, until I start to abduct young girls who remind me of Janine, torture and kill them, and keep their preserved heads in a secret space underneath the shed in my back garden. I am finally caught when the batteries on my untrasonic cat-scarer go flat while I’m ‘on holiday’ in Thailand and a neighbourhood moggie retrieves on of the heads and takes it back to its owner.
