A 7-year-old second-grader at Park Elementary School in Anne Arundel County, Md., was suspended for two days after chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun, the Washington Post reports, as do several national news outlets.
According to his father, the boy was trying to gnaw the strawberry-filled pastry , resembling a Pop-Tart, into the shape of a mountain. But when that didn’t work out, he decided it looked more like a gun and proceeded accordingly. When his work was finished, he picked it up and pointed it. School officials claim he then said, “Bang bang,” but the boy contends he didn’t say those words.
The direction of the pointing also seems to be a matter of controversy: school officials say he pointed it at a classmate, while the boy says he pointed it at the ceiling.
There is heightened security over guns these days, including punishment for toys that look like guns. For example, police in Alexandria, Va., arrested a 10-year-old for showing a toy gun to other students on his school bus, and school officials in Pennsylvania suspended a 5-year-old for talking to classmates about shooting her “Hello Kitty” gun, a bubble-blowing toy.
A letter to parents on Park Elementary’s website by Assistant Principal Myrna Phillips says a student had “used food to make inappropriate gestures and disrupted the class.” As of this writing, the letter is no longer linked to the home page, but it is still available on the site, here.
As the incident made national news Monday, the boy’s father told the Post that school officials had told him his son was suspended for behavior that included the gun-danish incident but also included other “ongoing behavior.” The letter, written Friday, though, would seem to indicate otherwise.
And so, it has come to this
The suspension here will likely remain on the boy’s permanent school record, although some similar incidents have resulted in the clearing of incidents from the permanent record. If it remains, I think someone who reads that record when the boy is 25 will come to the gun-danish incident and fall off their chair laughing, but maybe not. It would seem more appropriate here to offer counseling to ensure young students realize the great divide between play acting and a serious threat to student safety.
Many people I know are starting to feel guns have no real place inside school buildings. But this boy’s danish was not a gun: punishing him for a pastry, if that’s all it was, suggests a disconnect between reality (a breakfast food) and what school officials delude themselves into thinking is going on in a boy’s mind (the next school shooter unless someone stops him). If we lead in this way, we run the risk of not merely protecting our children from harm but of sheltering them from reality. Kids learn a lot by making mistakes and by testing the world around them, including the adults in that world. There’s no telling how much opportunity for real learning is lost when we remove students from school for nonviolence, how much social development and emotional strengthening is lost if we hide our heads in the sand. It would be like punishing Sarah Palin for posting cross-hairs on a map showing which politicians she is targeting with her campaign for conservatism. I thought we didn’t do that in America.
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.
