Welcome To Second Grade, Please Check Your Guns At The Door

I've been hearing about this story all day, so I decided to give my 15 cents.

Samuel Burgos, from Miramar, Florida, was expelled, and has missed nearly two years of school, for bringing a gun to Pembroke Pines Charter Elementary School West, in Broward County.  In an age following Columbine, it is easy to applaud this.  Good enough for him.  His parents should be ashamed.  But here's the catch.

The gun was a plastic toy.  It fires plastic beads.  And it remained in Samuel's book bag during the entire time he was in school, until it was discovered by school officials.  According to the boy, who was 7, at the time of the incident, he had been playing with it over the weekend, and in an attempt to hide it from his brother, he placed it in his book bag and simply forgot.  Sounds like a 7 year old to me.

I guess in a world where keeping our children safe has become a daily struggle, the school's zero tolerance policy for guns and the mandatory expulsion that goes along with that policy can be seen as clearly understandable.  But there's still a such thing as common sense.

I agree that the school should have punished the boy, because even accidentally, he should have never brought the toy to school.  But it's a TOY...I mean, come on.  I think this is a case where the system overstepped its bounds.  Kicking the boy out of school for a mistake that any 7 year old might easily make seems a bit extreme.  Now he's forced to be homeschooled by his parents (who are not teachers), and miss out on all of the very experiences that our society says are indispensable to a child.  The only option offered was sending him to an alternative school for "at risk" kids.  Sounds unfair.

I understand policy, and feel like policy should be enforced.  But as people, we sometimes err in our judgments, and policy can often be flawed.  These are the times when we correct our mistakes, and change the policy.  If policy is allowed to be rewritten, which is like giving it a second chance, shouldn't a 7 year old boy be allowed the same courtesy?  A hearing later this month will determine whether or not that is the case.

(The school has changed the mandatory expulsion part of its zero tolerance policy to only include firearms...but after Samuel was expelled.)

Maybe I'm just naive, but I think this punishment was entirely too harsh, and needs to be corrected.  Feel free to comment.

Much love,
Marcus

(P.S. --- check out the entire article on the story, as reported by CNN, here http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/10/06/toy.gun.expelled/index.html)