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Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Overreacting to gun games
May 15, 2002
The issue: Principal grills children about guns
Our view: If the questions are necessary, ask the parents
Even good school principals in first-rate districts make mistakes. What is so surprising about Dry Creek Elementary School Principal Darci Mickle's recent mistake -- she grilled several boys on whether their parents had guns in the home -- is what happened afterward: Neither she nor the Cherry Creek district has been willing to acknowledge the error.
The district has had two days since the story broke into the news -- national news, as it happens -- to ponder its response. Yet as late as Tuesday afternoon its top official for elementary schools, Mary Terch, still refused to say that the principal had been wrong.
Why not simply admit that Mickle made an overzealous mistake out of concern for safety? Why not just say that she hadn't meant to probe into family life in a way that is absolutely beyond the pale without parental consent?
Instead, Terch continued to defend the principal's actions -- although she did agree that it would have been preferable for Mickle to seek the parents' permission.
We're stunned that a school district fails to recognize that absent a genuine threat, it is simply none of a principal's business whether a family owns guns. And nothing we've heard about the game of army-and-aliens at Dry Creek school suggests it could pose any risk at all to anyone.
Little boys running around, pointing their fingers like pretend guns and shooting? Even "dying" dramatically? Why is that a problem? Next thing you know schools will be banning dodgeball.
Oh.
But a playground monitor thought the game was "violent and aggressive," according to Terch. So the participants were marched off to the principal's office, where Mickle told them the game was a violation of the school's 'zero-tolerance" policy. She summoned their parents to come get them; and before they arrived, she also questioned the boys about their families' ownership of guns.
Terch argues that Mickle acted appropriately in trying to find out about guns in the home. The principal "had to discern the level of threat against students and staff," she said.
But that's just the point; there wasn't any violence and there wasn't any threat. It sounds like the old ham-and-eggs joke: if we had a threat, we would have a gun threat if we had some guns.
State law requires zero-tolerance policies for students who bring weapons or weapons replicas to school, but we doubt legislators were thinking of finger-pointing when they passed the law.
Even Arnie Grossman, co-president of the gun-control group SAVE Colorado, no slouch when it comes to perceiving threats of violence, said it wasn't a gun issue.
"All of us played cops and robbers when we were young," he said.
The school can adopt a rule against imaginary gun games, we suppose, though we're not persuaded it is necessary. However, we can't read the state law as requiring such a policy. Terch said the school's rule against gun games was discussed several times in class, and that the children understood it.
Let us concede the point that sometimes, even if not this time, there are threats that must be taken seriously. Still, interrogating children about their families' beliefs and practices -- or what they own -- is not the appropriate response. There could be no immediate threat; the children were sitting, subdued, in the principal's office.
An estimated half of all Colorado families own guns. Schools have no business interrogating the kids whose families do as if they had something to be ashamed of.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_1146964,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
May 15, 2002
The issue: Principal grills children about guns
Our view: If the questions are necessary, ask the parents
Even good school principals in first-rate districts make mistakes. What is so surprising about Dry Creek Elementary School Principal Darci Mickle's recent mistake -- she grilled several boys on whether their parents had guns in the home -- is what happened afterward: Neither she nor the Cherry Creek district has been willing to acknowledge the error.
The district has had two days since the story broke into the news -- national news, as it happens -- to ponder its response. Yet as late as Tuesday afternoon its top official for elementary schools, Mary Terch, still refused to say that the principal had been wrong.
Why not simply admit that Mickle made an overzealous mistake out of concern for safety? Why not just say that she hadn't meant to probe into family life in a way that is absolutely beyond the pale without parental consent?
Instead, Terch continued to defend the principal's actions -- although she did agree that it would have been preferable for Mickle to seek the parents' permission.
We're stunned that a school district fails to recognize that absent a genuine threat, it is simply none of a principal's business whether a family owns guns. And nothing we've heard about the game of army-and-aliens at Dry Creek school suggests it could pose any risk at all to anyone.
Little boys running around, pointing their fingers like pretend guns and shooting? Even "dying" dramatically? Why is that a problem? Next thing you know schools will be banning dodgeball.
Oh.
But a playground monitor thought the game was "violent and aggressive," according to Terch. So the participants were marched off to the principal's office, where Mickle told them the game was a violation of the school's 'zero-tolerance" policy. She summoned their parents to come get them; and before they arrived, she also questioned the boys about their families' ownership of guns.
Terch argues that Mickle acted appropriately in trying to find out about guns in the home. The principal "had to discern the level of threat against students and staff," she said.
But that's just the point; there wasn't any violence and there wasn't any threat. It sounds like the old ham-and-eggs joke: if we had a threat, we would have a gun threat if we had some guns.
State law requires zero-tolerance policies for students who bring weapons or weapons replicas to school, but we doubt legislators were thinking of finger-pointing when they passed the law.
Even Arnie Grossman, co-president of the gun-control group SAVE Colorado, no slouch when it comes to perceiving threats of violence, said it wasn't a gun issue.
"All of us played cops and robbers when we were young," he said.
The school can adopt a rule against imaginary gun games, we suppose, though we're not persuaded it is necessary. However, we can't read the state law as requiring such a policy. Terch said the school's rule against gun games was discussed several times in class, and that the children understood it.
Let us concede the point that sometimes, even if not this time, there are threats that must be taken seriously. Still, interrogating children about their families' beliefs and practices -- or what they own -- is not the appropriate response. There could be no immediate threat; the children were sitting, subdued, in the principal's office.
An estimated half of all Colorado families own guns. Schools have no business interrogating the kids whose families do as if they had something to be ashamed of.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_1146964,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878