Souvenir rifle shell gets 4th-grader suspended

[beevul]

Thursday, May 29, 2008
Souvenir rifle shell gets 4th-grader suspended

Winchendon family shocked

By Gail Stanton CORRESPONDENT

The Toy Town Elementary School fourth-grader had received two empty rifle shell casings from blanks used during the town celebration held at the GAR Park Monday morning.

He brought one of the casings with him to school the next day.


“He was just playing with it at lunch,” explained Crystal Geslak, Bradley’s mother. “He wasn’t showing it to anyone; he had it in his hand and was playing with it.”

“He was so proud to have been given them. His dad’s a veteran, his uncle’s a veteran, both his grandfathers are veterans. Memorial Day is a big thing to us. It’s a very important holiday and we have a big celebration every year,” Ms. Geslak said.

After the piece of brass was confiscated, Ms. Geslak was called at work and told to come and pick up her son; he was being suspended for the next five days.

http://www.telegram.com/article/20080529/NEWS/805290859/1116

Zero tolerance gone mad.

The family was also told that thier ten year old son may be assigned a probation officer...Over a spent brass blank fired at a memorial day celebration...

A reading of the entire article is simply nauseating.

What a twisted "civilization" we live in.

[elleng]

1. IDIOT teacher/school,

don't understand 'discretion,' sure don't understand democracy.

WHERE is this?

[Fridays Child]

2. My 7th grade Social Studies kids did WWI projects and one of the topic choices was...

"The Opening Guns of WWI." One student brought a wooden rifle replica. On the day of his presentation, somehow, admin knew what he brought before I did, and they handled it just fine. They kept the replica in the office until it was time for him to present. And, when he was done, he walked back up to the office and turned it in, where it was held until the end of the day, I suspect. I never would have even known it was being handled that way, if the student hadn't told me.

[krispos42]

3. Working hard to increase gun paranoia at all costs, I see n/t

[ogsbee]

9. I'm afraid this instilling of gun paranoia is heading somewhere

(Great phrase, OK if I steal it?)

Step one: instill gun paranoia

Step two: stoke this fear by staging actual gun killings -- Cho simply could not have accomplished the shooting feat he's credited with at Virginia Tech. Columbine was too thorough for teenagers, IMO. (False flag attacks have a long history in the military and intel.)

Step three: once a Democratic president is in power, unleash worst civilian killing to date. Allow Democratic useful fools to call for gun confiscation, they will take the political fall over the resistance of Republican lovers of liberty (wink wink).

We'll see.

[iverglas]

10. okay, I get it

You've been sent here by the Brady Bunch to make gunheads look like loons.

You're certainly earning your wage so far!

[ogsbee]

11. Uh, Sweetie, ever hear your local Republican nutcases talk about Machiavelli?

Oh, silly me, you're a canucklehead. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, Canada will only be allowed to pretend to be a separate country as long as it suits the PTB (that's the "Powers That Be"). Who does your military answer to? That doesn't bother you?

[tularetom]

4. OK that's just friggin nuts

When I was a kid there was a little sort of private firing range down at the end of our road. Somebody hauled a big pile of sand out there and made a big mound to fire into. Everybody who lived near there used it. Our dad used it.

My little brother and some of his buddies used to go down there and pick up all the casings left lying around. They would also dig through the sand and recovered a lot of lead. At one point they had accumulated about three wheelbarrow loads of brass casings which they sold either to scrap dealers.

I don't recall anybody ever getting exercised over these 8 year old kids having shell casings by the hundreds.

Admittedly that was over 50 years ago but still, WTF;

[MercutioATC]

5. It's a friggin' casing...a small empty cylinder of brass closed on one end.

It's not even an inert round.

What kind of idiots are we hiring as school administrators these days?

[SteveM]

6. I'm a firm believer in suing over something like this....

I don't normally go to court (except when I know I will win), but this is the kind of absurd place schools have become: institutions wherein gross forms of punishment and discipline are applied willy-nilly just for the sport of it. Institutions should be made to pay for this gross abuse of authority.

[beevul]

8. I'm not so sure that it was done "just for the sport of it"...

I'm not so sure that it was done "just for the sport of it", but there was definitely a lack of critical thinking on the part of the acting authority involved.

I hope the family takes the acting authority to the cleaners, and does it in a way that effects them personally, rather than just effects the school.

Thats the only language some of these people understand.

[SteveM]

7. sorry, dupe (nt)