Student suspended for play in his yard
USMCE8Ret sends a link from Fox News about 7th grader Khalid Caraballo who was playing in his own yard with an Airsoft pistol before the bus came to pick him up when a neighbor saw the children playing and called the police. Young Kalid was suspended from school under it’s “zero tolerance” policy in regards to guns. I saw the story last night, but the school hadn’t weighed in yet. Apparently they have now;
In a letter obtained by WAVY.com, school principal Matthew Delaney found that the “children were firing pellet guns at each other, and at people near the bus stop.” Delaney states in the letter that one child “was only 10 feet from the bus stop, and ran from the shots being fired, but was still hit.”
The school’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy on guns extends to private property, according to the report.
Yeah, I think they need to check their copy of the Constitution. The school claims that the kids were playing “within 10 feet” of a bus stop. So? Do the schools understand who are their employers? They work for us. And this is a “zero-minus tolerance” policy. Clearly the school has stepped outside the boundaries of their responsibilities. Maybe they’d like to send a list of approved activities for students to engage in at their homes under the supervision of their parents, too. I guess schools and their administrators have come to the conclusion that they don’t know how to teach children, so they’re looking for something they can do instead.
Category: Schools
Another reason we’re homeschooling our children.
The *educators* are more retarded than Psul and Whippinghisdigit put together.
The school’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy on guns extends to private property, according to the report.
Totalitarianism-“for the children”!!!
Not so sure on this. According to some, there were kids shot and or shot at that were not in the yard but on the way to the bus stop (as the ones “playing in the yard” should have been at that time).
If it was a case of all the kids were involved by their own choice, on private property, then I think the school is over reaching.
The schools rules do allow for disciplinary action for events that occur on the way to school, and being in transit to the bus stop counts. Have a feeling those kids should have been on the way to the bus at that time….
A lot of over reaching by schools lately to things, but there may just be a little more to this story than what was reported by the family.
A school district in Maryland has a concerned father arrested for voicing his opinion about Common Core curriculum in an open forum, and now this bullshit. Since when did the school system gain such power over the lives of parents and students. I thought schooling our children was a collaborative effort. Guess not. Maybe we should just go with the futuristic science fiction version of child raising, where we just give them to the state when they are of school age. Maybe that is the next step in the liberal agenda.
So what happens to my daughter when she goes back to school after I take her to the range over the weekend? If I enroll her in a hunter safety class or a professionally-taught firearms safety course? Does that violate the “no tolerance” policy?
And yet I’m not allowed to complain if they promote homosexual lifestyles or teach a demonstrably false history curriculum.
To think that some people still wonder why our education system is failing so miserably…
His name is Khalid and he had a gun. That’s good enough for me.
The school needs to be able to deal with “bus stop bullies” You can’t have kids afraid of going to the bus stop for fear of being beaten up or being shot at by an airsoft gun. That being said, this sounds like a little over reach. At least the part about 0 tolerance extending to personal property. The bus stop in my neighborhood is in my front yard. If they think that means I can’t have my guns in my house than they are seriously deluded…
What the hell ever happened to cap guns? They made noise, they blew out gunsmoke, and they fired off nothing. You didn’t get a BB gun until you were 9, minimum, and then you had to use it on targets ONLY, and if you shot at the chickens, you lost the BB gun.
I want to go back to the 1950s. Things were safer then.
I can dream, can’t I?
@8. My 88 was an overturned picnic able with a broom handle stuck through the center hole. We had rock fights–and, yeah, I mean rock fights. We also killed each other alot–sometimes in slow mo. We climbed Pointe Du Hoc and jumped from it. it looked just like a shed! We also set booby traps with trip wires–and my mother kept wondering why her thread spools kept disappearing. Oh, and Kevin had an air rifle. It took us no time to figure out that if we pushed it into the dirt, it came out fully loaded and stung like crazy. The enemy was usually the German and, on occasion, the Jap. No one wanted to be the Italian or French soldier.
The school’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy on guns extends to private property, according to the report.
Nanny-statism at its finest. And you think that when Obamacare gets into full swing, Daddy gub’mint won’t be telling you what, when, and how much to eat?
Bitches, please.
I agree with #3 on this one. If they were shooting at kids at the bus stop that weren’t part of the game then I can understand. If they were only shooting at each other in their own yard then it is overreach. The whole school policy extending to private property thing is asinine.
My brother and I were once given cork guns to play with. After 5 minutes we had cut the strings off and were shooting each other. Watched my Uncle (the Marine that provided said cork guns) and both of my parents do a simultaneous facepalm…
@9, My tree house housed my toy gun arsenal. I can’t count how many times I had to defend it from the Chinese horde assaulting through my yard. I conducted many missions throughout the jungle that was the woods next to my house. I also assaulted Normandy from the shallow river that ran next to my house.
Okay, so let’s take this one step further. Kid is getting bullied on and off school grounds. School steps in and it stops at school, but continues off grounds via physical and mental (i.e., Facebook, etc.,) bullying.
Is the school still responsible? Some parents would say yes, although I think they’re wrong, but YMMV.
Again, what Twist said is correct. If other kids waiting for the bus were being shot at/hit, then yes, the school was correct, but if not, they can go pound sand up to the point one or both these kids try to get on the bus with these Airsoft guns, then it’s Junior Rodeo on.
@12, I got my son an automatic Nurf gun that has a 30 round drum magazine. It took him all of 5 minutes to lay an ambush out for my daughter and ambush her with a 30 round burst. We had to lay the ground rule that you can’t shoot an unarmed “combatant”.
Another story is going around from The Washington Times that states that one of the boys playing this game was the son of the woman who called the cops in the first place. Im guessing that it was easier for her to have the police come take care of it than for her to get dressed and go outside to yell at her own damn kid. Also reported in that article is this little gem, it comes from her call to the 911 dispatcher “He is pointing the gun, and it looks like there’s a target in a tree in his front yard,” she told the dispatcher. “This is not a real one, but it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me [uncomfortable], as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun.”
If in fact the kids were shooting around and either were aiming at or mistakenly hit one of the kids on their way to the bus stop (since I dont see them hitting the kids at the bus stop some 70 yards away) then it should be dealt with but I think expelling a kid for that is ridiculous.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/23/7th-grader-suspended-using-airsoft-gun-his-own-fro/
This is a crusade, or a jihad, if you like with the schools being the point of the spear, and the aim being the liberal’s dream of a totalitarian socialist regime—where the highly educated elite are finally to be given their well-deserved reward. This will happen once the fully-trained—conditioned—children have been thoroughly indoctrinated over a period of twelve to sixteen years or more.
It’s of vital importance to condition children against religion, against guns, against self-defense, against fighting back. The phrase “zero tolerance” might as well be lèse-majesté or royal prerogative. Under this vast umbrella which casts its shadow into our very backyards, the schools can punish—condition—the child no matter where he is. Touch, draw, speak of, listen to the forbidden thing and receive the electric shock. Soon, the very thought of the forbidden thing will induce unreasoning fear. Conform, Submit, Obey. These are the three pillars of the left’s new Godless religion.
Not too long ago, maybe 3 years back, a friend of mine’s daughter brought home a piece of paper to fill out for ‘homework’ from the public kindergarten she attended. It was basic questions about the household; how many people, how many pets, how many TV’s, and somewhere on that was a question about ‘are there guns in the house?’
So her dad, a good person (generally), wrote in his phone number and said ‘you can contact me as to why this question isn’t filled out’, and went on to ream some dumb teacher for saying ‘it’s just an innocent questionnaire’.
I’ve also heard of pediatricians asking kids if their parents had guns in the house.
Welcome to the continuing overreach.
Holy crap … if that kid was suspended for that … my son could soon be in federal prison.
His weapons locker includes:
1. Red Ryder
2. Nurf Guns (wide assortment including the 30 round auto, which is my favorite)
3. Homemade sling shot (made fron a perfect piece of cedar)
4. Bow and arrows (I was hit, only once)
5. Boomerrangs
6. Swords, swords and more swords
7. Water balloon launch devise (awesome)
I will allow him to watch “Lock Up” on MSNBC in ordfer to acclimate himself to prison life!
I know for a fact that schools around here know better than to ask questions like that. I also know if they try, they’ll be getting an earful from me and a lot of other parents.
That being said, the schools here still suck.
Just recently my son came upon a cat messing with something. He was curious and went to look. The cat ran away and what he found was a badly crippled chipmunk that was dying. He felt sorry for the critter, went to his mom’s and got his BB gun and put the chipmunk out of it’s misery. A neighbor saw this and she was appalled. She was going to call the police AND child protective services. Her husband couldn’t stop her but at least convinced her to call the DNR. The CO showed up from the DNR and gave my son a talk about using a BB gun in city limits (there’s an ordinance about it) but commended him for euthanizing the animal. I’d hate to think of what CPS would have done, thank goodness her husband talked her into calling the DNR…
Welcome to Virginia Beach Public Schools! They’ve been that retarded at least for 23 years, since I was a kid!
Pretty much agree with what most others have said, but think it all needs a slightly different spin.
Schools intervening in what occurs on private property is just wrong. Occasionally school personnel do become aware of criminal activity happening at home and can and should report it to the proper authorities, something the school is not.
Two (or more) kids running around in their yard playing with fake guns? No problem and no one’s business other than the parents of said kids. Parents allowing kids to play with fake guns which shoot actual projectiles off property? Not so good. Could be criminal, and something for the po-po to investigate, not the school.
Yes. Schools (aka the education industry) are meddling in far too many thing which are none of their business.
“Maybe they’d like to send a list of approved activities for students to engage in at their homes under the supervision of their parents, too.” Don’t give them any more wacky ideas.
The school district I worked for claimed authority over the kids at bus stops. Until someone asked the superintendent to define what constituted the area of the bus stop. After hemming and hawing, the school board came up with an imaginary 15′ by 15′ square at the designated stop. Better than nothing, I guess.
I can see the necessity of the school being able to discipline a student for a fight, assault and behavior that is addressed in the student handbook at the bus stops, but they have no business getting involved in what happens on private property.
Well, when people who are afraid of everything they see, but walk blindly through traffic lights with headsets glued to their ears and their eyes focused on the iPad/whatever they’re dragging along, what do you expect?
If the idiot with the headset crossing in the middle of the street gets hit by a car, it’s always someone else’s fault, not the idiot’s fault for jaywalking in the first place.
However, if the mother of this child called 911 instead of going out into the yard and taking the gun away from him and scolding him, she’s a compleat loon who should not be raising anything more important than parsley and tomatoes.
Remember a brief period when cap guns actually shot plastic projectiles? There was a little plastic ‘bullet’ which snapped into the front oa a spring-loaded ‘cartridge case’ and then you put an adhesive cap on the base of the cartridge – the cap going off caused the bullet to pop of the case and the spring pushed the bullet out hard enough to fly maybe 15 feet or so. About 1960 or therabouts? My first experience with reloading…..
@13. You guys fought the Chinese? That’s amazing. Your gang was quite advanced. As for the Nurf gun, just be grateful no one thought to push a pin through the contact point.
Jesus, these days, were I the same teenager buying bottle rockets by the gross and having shooting “wars” with the neighbor kids, DHS would have us all rounded up and sent to GITMO charged with deploying WMD’s.
@26. What good was the thing if you couldn’t make someone say “Ouch!” Now you put a Mento in a bottle of soda, cap it loosely, step away, watch it go Olf Faithful and you’re likely to be charged with terrorism and bomb making.
@#9 … “No one wanted to be the Italian or French soldier.”
That still holds … no one wants to be the Italian or French soldier today, either.
None of you guys ever took green apples, pulled out the cores and stuffed firecrackers into them?
@ 21 Old Tanker … I hope the BB gun will be OK. Always remember … a few drops of oil after each use!
Upstate … Chipmonks = Target Practice!
“Get some, get some … if they run, they are dead chipmonks. If they stand still, they are well disciplined chipmonk.”
“You ever shoot women, or children chipmunks?”
“Sure!”
“How can you do that?”
“Easy! You just don’t lead into ’em as much!”
What type of school district was this?
I would like to know before I weigh in….
Guess I need to lock down the FB photos of our son and I throwing tomahawks.
We even won a DVD and knife from Cold Steel using the Trench Hawk.
@32:
This is my BB gun. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
@15 This is why when I get my son a Nerf gun his twin sister will also be properly armed.
“Zero tolerance” basically means “zero leeway” and “zero brainpower used”. Schools draft up all of this stuff in an inane attempt to prevent the next school shooting, because the ninnies that run them (ie: elected school board officials) are running scared and do not understand that while horrendous and tragic, school shootings are pretty darn rare (thankfully).
Moreover, like the gun laws everyone here likes (total sarc there), such policies only deal with the most visible part of a school shooting: the gun. Like the recent Navy Yard shootings and going all the way back to Columbine, there’s always been dots to connect, a paper trail about past incidents and mental health issues that people have failed to do anything about. But that problem is “hard”, meaning it actually requires someone to care enough to do the work. Banning guns and all gun-like activities allows a school board member to grandstand about how they “care about the children” without any hard work involved.
The other aspect is something a lot of you have already touched on: Many parents don’t want to parent and want the school to do everything for them. Too many parents like that have, over the years, given school administrators free reign to do and claim whatever they want now. You have a whole generation of school administrators who think they now have carte blanche to dictate all aspects of their students’ lives, and you can thank every parent who demanded the school “do something” about a situation they should’ve handled themselves.
If you haven’t heard of it already, the blog Free Range Kids has numerous stories of kids getting busted by the School Police State for daring to even depict a gun-like thing on campus.
I always say: if a school board wants to implement a dumb security theater policy, they should try out on themselves first.
I think they overreached for sure (home is not school), but I think the intent was genuine to protect the kids.
The problem IS parents in many cases.
What kids will see; kids will do and that BB gun could quickly become a .40.
As stated, not defending the school board as most of them I had to deal with were composed of stagnated morons, but I believe the intent is there.
School yard yes, yard at home, absolutely not.
There was a kid here at the local grade school who was actually taken into custody by Family Services. His father was arrested for child abuse and his mother for negligence. They also had their daughter (high school student and local junior rodeo star) taken by family services.
The reason is the teacher asked the kids what they did over the summer, and he said that his father took him out shooting at the range with a .22 rifle and pistol.
It is getting insane in this day and age that the school can determine what is and is not appropriate activity for children when they are not on school grounds and punish the parents if this secret list is violated.
This is what the school “charged” him with:
“possession, handling and use of a firearm”
An Airsoft gun is a TOY! Yes, you have to be careful not to shoot people in the eye, but it’s far from a weapon of any kind. My boys sniped the neighborhood for hours with those things, the bigger the better.
Blackfive had posts this week about how soldiers in the Army are being treated as children instead of grown adults that can be responsible for firearms and the like. This incident is part of the problem.
Everything boys like to do is illegal. Toy guns, motorized go-carts and scooters, fireworks, etc. Society is not only extending childhood until they’re 30, they are feminizing the boys.
I have 2 boys and a girl, all young adults now. Boys like violent things that go boom, it’s in their nature. My sons and their cousins made guns out of anything they could find from a very young age – Duplos, Legos, sticks, hangers, etc. They crashed their toy cars, burned them with magnifying glasses, and made fire-throwers out of cans of hairspray (when they were older).
Schools want boys to be girls and sit still in class, not get dirty or play roughly, and to be clean. All that does is get boys screwed up in the head. Boys like to be active, dirty, rough and loud. Hopefully they learn to be civilized as they grow older, at least around their mothers 😉
While the boys were doing all of that, my daughter was playing dress up and with dolls. For several years she has wanted nothing more than to get married and make babies. She’s also in the COANG and loves her firearms so there’s a bit of that rough stuff in her too.
My daughter and her husband have already decided to homeschool their kids when they start having them. Not homeschooling my kids was one of my biggest regrets.
I wonder what would happen if they
saw my kids like this?
Boy, things sure have changed since I was in grade shcool. No dodge ball any more, right? No recreational games like softball during lunch hour, no running around like mad things chasing each other, no climbing to the top of a large boulder and pushing the competitors off of it until you got pushed off, no climbing into that big steel swing set in the back of the school yard to see how high you could get it to go before you jumped out of the seat, no steel slide 8 feet high that you slicked up with waxed paper so that you could slide down the ramp and go flying into space.
No, let’s make sure that kids NEVER learn how to deal with things like bumps and bruises that come naturally through play. Let’s wrap them in fleece and styrofoam so that they don’t get any scars, because scars are SO ugly. Let’s just make sure that if they play football, nobody gets a sprain or a broken collar bone, and both teams win the game.
Let’s take reality out of the mix and turn them into zombies, while we’re at it, too. And let’s hire lots of teachers who don’t know how to cope with growing, active children who want to be outside, running around like mad things.
OH, yeah — almost forgot this: Chicago’s public school system rates pretty low on test scores for all subjects.
I don’t know if the corresponding factor is the teachers’ union being more interested in their pensions than they are in teaching, or if it’s just plain bad teaching. Might be a combination of the two. The students at Catholic schools and private/charter schools, however, do quite well on those same tests.
Again, I had a .22 rifle OF MY OWN (saved up for, parents purchased for me) before I turned 10.
I’ll say that again–10. I worked to save money and spent it on ammo. I spent I don’t know how many days plinking odd targets BY MYSELF during the (very) short Idaho summers, and humping the mountains with my dad, going deer and elk hunting until I got my own hunting license at the ripe old age of 12. Kids going to school with a .30-06 in the rifle rack in the rear window was no big thing. They either went hunting before or after school, sometimes both. They didn’t jump out the windows, nobody went and shot up the schools, etc.
And these panty-waisted little limp-wristed douchetards would put my parents IN JAIL if they did that now?
This is NOT the same nation I grew up in. No way, no how.
@ 41 Old Tanker … angry children with guns, so close to a lake. Ah … those poor little fish. I hope someone call the Fish and Game Commission on those angry children with guns!
@43 well where minorities are the majority of the student body the 11th grade college readiness scores are abysmal, where whites are the majority of students that is less so. The differences are significant and interesting to read…
Here’s a sample:
Naperville with 70% White enrollment:
11th Graders Meeting College Readiness Benchmarks: 71% (+50%) in Reading, 72% (+53%) in Math, 60% (+49%) in Science, 84% (+46%) in English
Versus Waukegan with 74% Hispanic enrollment:
11th Graders Meeting College Readiness Benchmarks: 13% (-8%) in Reading, 11% (-8%) in Math, 5% (-6%) in Science, 23% (-15%) in English
Most of the worst school in any area are those where large minority populations are present, mostly because those families are broken at a rate higher than white families. No responsible parents, or single parent only families tends to create an adverse environment for responsible study, who knew right? When mom and dad are involved the kids do better, wow what a revelation….I realize I am a complete racist for pointing out that minority families are single mother families at rates significantly higher than whites and that 57% of the women giving birth at the single parent rates are without a high school diploma….
Those numbers don’t bode well for the society at large. Perhaps instead of worrying about airsoft guns they should be teaching the basics of math and science along with the concept that raising bastard children is a disgusting, immoral act that often sentences that child that they profess to love to a life of ignorant poverty….
Nah, we can’t do that we wouldn’t want to offend 2/3rds of the black or half the hispanic men for abandoning their children and expecting other people to pick up the tab, that would be an ugly stereotype even if it is just the plain f@cking truth. Which we as a nation are no longer equipped to absorb anymore.
No wonder we are so f#cked up these days.
They want your kids fat dumb and stupid and unable to defend themselves. thats the new lib goal.
@47 Where’s Dean Wormer when you need him?
Update… The 3 boys were expelled, Aidan Clark will be homeschooled, one of the other boys will attend an alternative school (making a delinquent out of a boy who was playing with a TOY in his own YARD).
This is the ignorant biotch who called 911 (is she going to be charges for abusing 911?):
The school found out about the kids playing around because a neighbor, the mother of one of the children not suspended, called 911. WAVY tracked her down:
She confirmed Khalid was taking target practice using a zombie hunter airsoft gun to kill the zombies. There was also a net behind the target to catch the plastic pellets.
The caller also knew the gun wasn’t real and said so, “This is not a real one, but it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me (uncomfortable), as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun,” she told the 911 dispatcher.
@47, no Mike, only the elite children can be fat. All of the serfs must be emaciated so they are not strong enough to fight against the proletariat. Remember, Moochelle said that she wants to see people eat healthier and less… just before she shoved a 1/2 lb burger dripping with fat and bacon down her gullet.