When Belle got a call last September that her 10-year-old had been sent to the vice principal’s office, she rushed over to the school. Her son Lee looked on anxiously as the vice principal explained the situation: The fifth grader had angrily pointed his finger in the shape of a gun.
Belle scolded him for not thinking before he acted, agreeing with administrators at the East Tennessee public elementary school who felt that he had misbehaved.
While Lee sat at home for a few days serving a suspension, the principal called Belle. The school had conducted an investigation and determined that Lee would be kicked out for an entire calendar year. “I regret that it has come to this,” the principal wrote in a subsequent letter, which Belle provided to ProPublica. (At Belle’s request, ProPublica is identifying her and her son only by their middle names and leaving out the name of the district and school to prevent her child from being identifiable.) In the letter, the principal added that the district and the state of Tennessee “take such threats very seriously.”
Belle was horrified. Lee had never even been sent to school detention before. His grades sometimes flagged, but he had been working hard to improve them. The family didn’t own a gun and Lee would have no idea where to get one. Belle recalls the principal saying on the phone that she knew Lee was a good kid. His punishment, Belle thought, seemed like an extreme overreaction. . . .
The principal’s action was the result of a new state law that had gone into effect just months earlier, heightening penalties for students who make threats at school. Passed after a former student shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville, the law requires students to be expelled for at least a year if they threaten mass violence on school property, making it a zero-tolerance offense.
— Aliyya Swaby in A 10-Year-Old Pointed a Finger Gun. The Principal Kicked Him Out of His Tenn. School for a Year.
“A 10-Year-Old Pointed a Finger Gun. The Principal Kicked Him Out of His Tenn. School for a Year.”
Oh, I dunno, a ‘Pull my finger’ by me could be lethal, depending on what I ate… 😉
He should have flicked a bugger.
The feeble live and walk amongst us.
Hmmm… I can’t seem to make my fingers resemble the shape of a gun, said realism and fact as they still look like fingers and are in the shape of fingers, said realism and fact, probably because fingers are not guns but are fingers said realism and fact. If they did look like guns, think of what that would do to the emotions of the anti-gun as they would be constantly triggered by their ‘finger guns’