Josh Welch: Is that a pastry in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?
Maryland educators have struck again. In their quest to become stewards of the safest schools in the country, administrators in the state recently suspended not one but two 6-year-olds for pointing their finger like a gun. On Friday their overly developed imaginations ran wild in a wholly new direction.
Baltimore station FOX45 reports that 7-year-old Josh Welch created a “disruption” at Park Elementary School in “Charm City,” resulting in a two-day suspension and warning letter sent home to other parents. “Josh was enjoying [a] breakfast pastry,” the article notes, “when he decided to try and shape it into a mountain.”
Josh explains what happened next:
It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t.
But it was in the eyes of Josh’s teacher, who, he told reporters, “was pretty mad.”
Perhaps the most disturbing detail of the story is that Josh knew he was in trouble the instant his teacher laid eyes on the strawberry tart cum firearm. He knew he was in trouble? Is this what the state is inculcating in its young charges — an awareness that if they create an object that vaguely resembles a gun, even inadvertently, they will face serious disciplinary action? This is beyond mind control.
Josh’s dad was astounded to learn about his son’s suspension, which he views as an obvious overreaction. “I would almost call it insanity,” he said. “I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it’s a pastry … Ya know?”
FOX45 fails to provide a sense of how other parents of children at Park Elementary reacted to the letter received late Friday informing them that “a student used food to make an inappropriate gesture.”
Although incidents of schools misapplying zero tolerance policies have spiked since the Newtown shootings, cases of overreaction predate the masscare. An incident similar to this latest development occurred at a Tennessee school in December 2011, when a 10-year-old was called out by administrators after he bit a pizza slice into a handgun shape at lunchtime.
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wow…pulled a potato out a bag last week that looked like a gun (or a female pleasure device). Good thing I cut it up!
Are you ever in hot water — first producing a weapon (or female pleasure device; either is trouble), then destroying the evidence.
I didn’t grow the potato Howard…it was in a bag that I bought from a store…but I do learn a lot from Democrats…destroy the evidence then “deny, deny, deny” (I was pointing my finger at the screen there… “I did NOT have a potato” or lately “the sequester was not my idea”).
It does not matter how you came to be in possession of such a potato, the fact is that it was your potato and it was in violation of some law somewhere. Eating such a potato to destroy the evidence does not reduce your guilt. You should have turned yourself in to the nearest authorities and confessed. Who knows, those authorities might have thought it looked more like the other item you mentioned, and you would have been applauded for your open minded vegetable consumption. Now we’ll never know.
what potato? (I told you I learned a lot from Democrats). My back-up position is “what difference does it make”
LOL!
I was going to add another fallback…that I gave the potato a “Vince Foster” but that would have been bad.