At least we can all sleep well knowing that the school is now protected from the serious threat of a five-year-old with an imagination.
A five-year-old girl was suspended from her North Carolina elementary school for playing a game with a stick that looked like a gun, according to her mother.
Brandy Miller, the girl’s mother, told WRAL.com that her daughter Caitlin had been playing a game during recess at J. W. McLaughlin Elementary School where her friends were a princess and queen and she was the security guard with a gun-shaped stick. When another child on the playground came up to them, she pointed the stick at him as part of the game. That student told their teacher, and Caitlin was sent to the principal’s office for violating the school’s zero-tolerance policy — and as it turns out, she had apparently violated it so severely that it warranted a one-day suspension.
WRAL reports that Miller’s mom received a letter from the school explaining that Caitlin had been suspended for “turning a stick into a gun and threatening to shoot and kill other students.”
“One minute she’s playing with her friends and the next her teachers are dragging her to the principal’s office,” Miller told WTVD. “She’s confused. Nobody explained anything to her.”
This is the playground where a 5 yr. old found a stick that school officials say resembled a gun. She was suspended for a day. #abc11 pic.twitter.com/L1niHRZt2u
— Morgan Norwood (@MorganABC11) March 28, 2017
Sorry, but this entire thing is completely ridiculous. Kids play these kinds of imaginative games all the time, and being a kid who plays these kinds of games is not the same thing as being a kid who is earnestly “threatening to shoot and kill other students.” But the district is insisting that the school did the right thing.
“It is our duty to ensure the safety of our students and staff,” Hoke County Schools said in a statement to WRAL. “Therefore, we respond to all threats in a serious manner and take appropriate action.”
But here’s the thing: This situation is the perfect example of what’s wrong with these kinds of zero-tolerance policies. They don’t allow for considerations on a case-by-case basis, which is ridiculous seeing as how every case is different, and this kind of punishment for a case that involved a five-year-old playing a game with a stick is clearly an obvious overreaction.
What good does it do to humiliate a student for playing a game that she didn’t even understand was wrong? After all, as Miller noted in a Facebook post as reported by the Washington Post, kids routinely play laser tag and games with nerf and squirt guns, and it makes complete sense that Caitlin would not have thought there was anything wrong with what she was doing. Why not just talk to her about it?
The school states that the intent behind its policy is to “ensure the safety of the students and staff,” but I am pretty sure that no one with a brain would tell you that a single person at the school would have been in any kind of danger had Caitlin been allowed to attend school the next day.
But do you know who it did hurt? Caitlin.
“She feels like all the teachers hate her,” Miller’s Facebook page stated. “I can’t imagine being 5 and feeling that way.”
Terrible, right? But hey — at least we can all sleep well knowing that the school is now protected from the serious threat of a five-year-old with an imagination.