According to the Dallas Morning News, Ahmed Mohamed and his siblings have been pulled out of the Irving (Texas) Independent School District. Plans are afoot to place the children in a new school — when they return home from Mecca, where they are headed for hajj.
Here’s hoping the new school they have selected is not in the Mercer Island (Wash.) School District. No, the district is no more Islamophobic than the one in Irving, but it does have its own loony zero-tolerance policy, which has just been extended to exclude the game of tag.
MyNorthwest.com reports that “the school district’s communications director Macy Grade, in an email, told Q13 that the ‘rationale behind this [ban] is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.'”
“Emotional safety?” author Jason Rantz asks rhetorically:
Are kids such wimps that they become traumatized while chased in a game they volunteer to play? Or is that the hyper-sensitive, hyper-protective school district feels the need to protect students from made up dangers to justify their paychecks?
The answer, I would submit, is yes and yes. Some kids have indeed become wimps, thanks predominantly to the neuroses of their parents who are overly eager to cater to their child’s every whim. What’s that, you say? Your 5-year-old likes to dress up in his sister’s clothes? Better get busy painting his room pink and replacing his cars and trucks with dolls. No chance he’s just going through a phase that many children go through.
Mercer Island, by the way, is not the first school district to ban tag. In 2013, Port Washington (N.Y.) Schools banned the use of balls(!) during recess along with “physical” games like tag. The superintendent explained:
Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected.
In Calgary, Canada, in 2014 meantime, the parents of a first-grader were warned that their child had taken part in a “dangerous chasing game.” I take it on faith that the game in question was not “Grand Theft Auto.”
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