A fifth-grade boy was suspended for three days from Devonshire Alternative Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio, for making his hand into the shape of a gun and pointing it at another student, the Associated Press reports.
The ten-year-old boy said he was “just playing around.” “People play around like this a lot at my school,” the boy, who has never been in trouble at the school before, said.
Jeff Warner, the district spokesman, said that students and parents have been warned multiple times that pretending to use a gun is a punishable offense and that three newsletters saying as much have been sent home with students.
Statewide zero-tolerance policies allow schools to suspend students for play-acting with pretend guns. In a similar instance in 2009, also in Columbus, Ohio, a 14-year-old student was suspended for shooting a foam dart out of a Nerf gun. He narrowly avoided expulsion.