If school administrators don’t have leeway to apply rules in different ways for different circumstances, then there are going to be ridiculous outcomes.
A ten-year-old was permanently expelled from Flippen Elementary School in Georgia after bringing a couple of “Bang Snap” noisemakers with him in his backpack.
Yes — expelled. Not disciplined, not suspended, expelled.
Atlanta’s WSB-TV reports that the fourth grader had brought a couple of the noisemakers with him to the bus stop. His mother (identified only as “Noelle”) said that her son didn’t even realize that he still had three Bang Snaps left in his bag when he arrived at school. He got busted with them after another student told the principal what had happened at the bus stop. The school then expelled him, citing a rule in the school’s handbook that requires expulsion for any student who brings an “explosive compound” onto school grounds.
Of course, to be fair, Bang Snaps do technically contain small amounts of silver fulminate, which is in fact an explosive. If you’ve ever played with Bang Snaps, however, then you already know that the amount of the substance found in the toys is completely and totally harmless. As Noelle explained to WSB-TV, you can even pop them in your hand and be totally fine.
“It doesn’t harm you, it doesn’t hurt you,” Noelle said. “It makes a noise.”
“They don’t even make a spark,” she continued.
Noelle is reportedly appealing the expulsion decision to the local school board. She said she still has other children who attend school in the district, and that she has no idea what she will do about finding somewhere for her son to attend school if the board doesn’t give her a break.
“Mama, what are we going to do next? Are we going to have to move?” Noelle said her son keeps asking. “Like, how am I going to go to school?”
Her young son, she added, still doesn’t even really understand what it is that he did wrong.
If you’re someone with even half a brain, then it should be easy for you to understand just how stupid and unfair this whole thing is. This kid did absolutely nothing to put anyone in any danger whatsoever, and now he’s having his education jeopardized. The whole purpose of school discipline is to deter children from doing things that harm themselves or others, and this kid’s bringing noisemakers to school was neither.
I understand that the school’s handbook mandates that the punishment for bringing any sort of explosive is expulsion — which, in general, would be completely fair. Most forms of explosives are incredibly dangerous, and any student who would actually put his or her classmates at risk by bringing something dangerous to class would definitely deserve to be expelled. I’m guessing, however, that noisemakers are not what the writers of this school handbook had in mind when they made the rule that was applied in this incident, and so the school should have been able to have made a different ruling.
This kid did absolutely nothing to put anyone in any danger whatsoever.
I’m assuming that the reason the school ruled the way it did is because its no-explosives-or-you’re-expelled rule must have been some sort of “zero tolerance” policy — which demonstrates the problem with these kinds of policies in general. If school administrators don’t have any leeway to apply rules in different ways for different circumstances, then there are always going to be ridiculous outcomes like this. In every handbook, there should be some sort of clarification that a different punishment can be doled out to a student if that student’s specific circumstances call for it. Every situation is unique, and we should let administrators do their jobs in a way that reflects this reality.