One of the most awesome toys ever created, at least in my view, is Lego. When I was a kid, I would spend hours playing with those things, and I always kind of regretted getting rid of them as I got older. Sure, they’re toys, but they were so versatile that you could build anything you wanted.
And with kids, many of them gravitate toward building weapons because, well, that’s what kids want to play with. For one kid, though, it led to a school suspension.
I wish I were making this up, but I’m not.
Now, the mother of the Georgia student has questions.
A woman in Georgia is questioning her son’s three-day suspension after school officials said the 8-year-old brought a small LEGO creation resembling a gun to class, sparking debate over zero-tolerance discipline policies for young students.
“This is the weapon they say my child had,” the boy’s mother said while holding the LEGO creation. “This is clarified as a weapon to the school district.”
The mother said her son, who has autism and ADHD, did not threaten anyone or behave aggressively.
“My child did not go to school and say anything harmful or bad,” she said. “They could have simply explained to him, ‘Hey, we cannot build things that we think are a weapon or look like a gun.’”
She said she received a phone call from the school principal informing her that her son had brought a weapon to school.
But the weapon was a Lego creation. Clearly, this woman thought it had to be, you know, a real weapon, which had her concerned since she says they don’t have firearms in the house. Of course, “weapons” and “firearms” aren’t perfect synonyms, but I get her thinking at the moment.
And when she got there, it was some Lego bricks put together in a shape that sort of resembled a firearm.
Look, zero-tolerance rules may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but this is akin to the kid who got suspended for eating a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun and started playing with it. These are kids who are into playing with weapons to some degree or another. There’s no way anyone can be harmed with Lego, unless they step on it. There was no way the Pop-Tarts would hurt anyone, nor would anyone be hurt by the shirts of countless students who have faced suspension for wearing clothing showing their support for our troops.
What “zero-tolerance” means in this context is actually “zero sense.”
No, students with weapons shouldn’t just be shrugged off, but why not save that for actual threats to the school, not a young child with a toy that literally can’t look that much like a real weapon, no matter how much work he put into it.
Meanwhile, the people who pushed many of these policies are now trying to make it so that actual violent criminals spend no time in prison and violent high school students don’t face punishment to avoid the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
Please, make it make sense. Please?
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