A school called in the police after a six-year-old with Down's Syndrome pointed a "finger gun" at a ... [+]
Zealotry leads to stupidity. Schools have demonstrated this over and over again. The latest example comes from a school district in Pennsylvania where a six-year-old girl with Downs Syndrome pointed her finger at a teacher and said: “I shoot you.” Pursuant to school policy, the teacher reported the girl to the principal who called in the poor girl’s mother. The principal also assembled the “threat assessment team.” In a brief moment of clarity, sanity and common sense, the principal and threat assessment team assessed that the six-year-old girl was . . . not a threat. However, the moment of sanity was not to last. They reported the girl to the police nonetheless.
There is now a police report with her name on it in connection with a threat to shoot a teacher. Since the girl is a juvenile, the report should be safe from prying eyes. Let’s hope so.
The girl’s mother has the forbearance of a saint. She wrote in the comments section of the news report: “I am the mother in this story. And I want to make it clear that I do not in any way blame the teacher or principal for how this situation was handled. As the school district stated in its statement, they were simply following policy. The purpose of my going public is to change the school policy so that this does not happen again. It's not in any way to ridicule the teacher or principal at my daughter's school. In fact, they have both done an incredible job supporting my daughter and our family in many other instances. I think this is truly a perfect example of why it's so dangerous to enact policies that tie the hands of our teachers and principals so that they can't make appropriate decisions on the ground to keep all our students safe.”
It's a good thing we live in a digital age or I would run out of ink chronicling the many ways in which panic and zealotry over gun violence, racism, sexual assault, harassment, and other issues have led to rigid policies that elevate punitive measures over common sense. Recently, I’ve written about an African American security guard who was fired for telling a student not to call him the n-word (because he used that word in telling the student not to call him that), a 10-year-old girl who ended up on a sexual predator watch list for “pantsing” a classmate on a school playground, 10-year boys who have been charged as sex offenders for aggressive verbal behavior towards girls in a game of tag, and a college student who was suspended for sexual assault after a “hearing” that an appellate court called a “kangaroo court” saying that they were “at a total loss why anybody interested in a fair and accurate outcome would do something like that.”
I nominate the mother of the girl with Downs Syndrome for Secretary of Education. She is exactly right that it is “dangerous to enact policies that tie the hands of our teachers and principals so that they can't make appropriate decisions on the ground.”
These days, people are scared of a lot of things. And people seem prepared to assume the worst about other people, including school kids. This is a good time to think about the virtues of old-fashioned values like due process, moderation, and judgment. None of the things discussed in this post should have happened. In several cases, the person making it happen didn’t want to do it but was forced to by “zero tolerance” and related policies.
Part of the problem is that nobody wants to be seen as soft on issues of guns, racism, etc. So, people are afraid to oppose zero-tolerance policies targeting the things that people are afraid of. Fear feeds fear. Meanwhile, the very kids whom society is supposed to be protecting suffer the consequences of adults’ unwillingness to put themselves on the line for exercising judgment rather than following inflexible rules. Surely, rules can be written to protect schools from gun violence that still allow a teacher to distinguish between a six-year old’s finger and a gun.
