A little over a year ago, a second grader in Anne Arundel County, Md., was suspended after he chewed his Pop-Tart into the shape of a handgun, pointed it at other students, and said, “Bang, bang!”
At the time, I wrote the following:
If the boy’s record provides no reason for the suspension but the gun-danish incident, this abridged permanent record will say that we in 2013 stuck our heads in the sand and removed students from school for a little creativity. School officials will be forever unable to comment on this incident, because it involves the discipline of a minor student, but it is my hope that news media are not reporting the whole story. There must surely be an established pattern of behavior in this case: simply chewing a pastry into the shape of a gun and picking it up as one can’t violate any school code of conduct, or we’re all doomed.
The boy’s parents have given school officials to talk publicly about the incident, and some new details about the boy’s disruptive behavior came to light at a hearing last week.
Now, as the Washington Post reports, in a story entitled “‘Pop-Tart’ case gun appeal: School officials say the problem was ongoing misbehavior,” there was an established pattern of misbehavior.
“We had not been able to make him understand that he had to follow the rules,” the Post quoted Sandra Blondell, principal at Park Elementary School, as testifying during an appeals hearing on April 29 that lasted more than six hours.
Laurie Pritchard, the school system’s director of legal services, was quoted as saying that the object central to the case had been incorrectly characterized, as had the reason for the discipline. “First of all, it wasn’t a Pop-Tart; it was a breakfast pastry,” she said. “And he was not suspended because he chewed his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun,” but for “an ongoing classroom disruption.”
The school showed a list of past misbehavior at the hearing, but the boy’s parents said they hadn’t seen the list and were unaware of many incidents on it.
I’m grateful to the boy’s parents for allowing the actual details of the incident to be reported publicly. It made no sense to me, as readers can probably figure out from what I wrote last year, that a second grader would be suspended for chewing a pastry into any shape and play-acting with it. Guns, though, including pretend guns, are inappropriate in a school, especially within months of the Sandy Hook shooting, when the final event in this particular string of disruption occurred.
