Schools (over?) react to Newtown shooting

Suspension for chewing pastry into gun shape

ANNAPOLIS, MD. — The counter-reaction to the U.S. reaction to December’s elementary-school massacre in Newtown, Conn., reached the legislative level this week, when a Maryland state senator introduced a bill that would prevent public schools from suspending students solely because they formed their fingers into the shape of a gun and said “Bang!”

The proposed law, titled the Reasonable School Discipline Act, was tabled by state Sen. J.B. Jennings two weeks after a 7-year-old Baltimore boy was sent home for two days for chomping his breakfast pastry into what his vice-principal thought looked like a pistol.

“All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda,” second-grader Joshua Welch confessed to the Fox News Network, and his dad.

On Wednesday, that dad — B.J. Welch, a firearms enthusiast — testified before the education, health and environmental affairs committee of the Maryland State Senate about what he called “the breakfast pastry incident.”

“How come zero tolerance has turned into zero common sense?” Welch demanded.

“It’s not just Newtown,” Welch told Postmedia News in an interview at the state capitol.

“There is this whole stigma across the country. Maybe it started with Columbine, I don’t know. But people’s biases are coming into it and even the little kids” are being dragged in.

“It’s time to act,” said state Sen. J. B. Jennings, a dairy farmer-legislator who introduced the bill after receiving messages and calls from parents across Maryland, which seems to have become a nexus of over-cautious post-Newtown educators.

The tempest that made headlines in Baltimore in early March was the state’s third case of a boy under the age of 8 being sent home for drawing, masticating, or pulling the trigger on a make-believe Mauser.

“The thing we are not going to get back is that moment when he gets to be a kid, instead of being pulled out and told that he is bad,” testified Teri Bildstein of Easton, Md., whose 6-year-old son was suspended for making a shooting gesture while playing cops-and-robbers during recess.

Jennings noted that, when the al- leged offenders move on to middle and high school, “all they’re going to see is a kid who was suspended in the second grade for something involving guns.”

“It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious as it being on his record,” attorney Robin Ficker, who has been retained by the Welch family to have young Joshua’s suspension expunged from his record, said.

“It just doesn’t make sense to remove a small child. Taxpayers are paying to educate these kids. Now we’re telling them that if they draw the shape of the state of Oklahoma or Idaho or Florida, they’re going to get suspended because those states are shaped like a gun.”

In the breakfast pastry incident, school authorities felt sufficiently alarmed that they sent a note home with students, stating: “If your children express that they are troubled by today’s incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counsellor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week.”

Maryland has not been the only state affected by post-Newtown controversy. An 8-year-old Virginia boy was suspended for pointing his finger like a pistol, and a 17-year-old San Francisco girl was suspended indefinitely after a teacher opened her personal notebook and found a poem commenting on the Newtown shooting that included the line “I know why he pulled the trigger.”

Back in Maryland, while Jennings was writing his bill and soliciting the Welches and Bildstein as supporting witnesses, a county in the southern part of the state was instituting a new set of rules that, among other restrictions on birthday party invitations, cupcakes, and visits by younger siblings, prohibits parents from hugging any child but their own.

“We think it’s the right balance between safety and parental involvement,” the district’s executive director of elementary schools told reporters in St. Mary’s County.

“No hugs?” education committee vice-chair Roy C. Dyson asked at the Wednesday hearing. Dyson then recalled a favourite teacher from his own school days who would honour well-behaved pupils by letting them sit in her lap while she read to the class from her rocking chair.

“If she did that now,” the vicechair said, “she’d be indicted.”