imported post
While I wouldn't support a permanent expulsion of middle school student for having an airsoft gun at school, it is important to note this was an emergency expulsion. The emergency expulsion is intended to give the school a means of immediately excluding a student that may present a danger or risk of substantial and material disruption. (note the emphasis)
The 10-day appeal window quoted in the article isn't quite right. The parents can appeal within 10 days, but in that same 10 days the district must decide whether they are going to let the students return, convert the emergency expulsion to a suspension, or permanently expel the students. Before they can long-term suspend a student or permently expel a student, they have to provide due process in the form of a hearing. The emergency expulsion gets the students out of the school until the hearing is scheduled.
That being said, it would be assanine to long-term suspend or expel middle school students for this behavior. The zero-tolerance laws and policies infuriate me as a former educator -- they do not take into account that many high school students and essentially all middle-school students (and younger) have no capability or minimal capability of abstract thought. That is, they think in concrete terms and cannot necessarily foresee the consequences of their actions. They also are probably not capable of extrapolating rules to "grey areas" -- in this case, I would imagine if the rule said "guns are prohibited" they would think "guns" literally, not "toy guns." (I thought everbody who has ever been around a middle schooler understood that they don't think before they act -- teaching them to do so is part of what school is supposed to do!)
I'll finish my rant with this -- the gun free schools act, like other gun control legislation, was pushed by the Dems. Those same Dems like to point out how we need to dump more and more money into the schools because of the high dropout rates and poor test scores. They apparently aren't capable of abstract thought, either. It seems pretty obvious that if you expel a kid for a year, he won't graduate on time, and is probably headed toward a lot of problems after he gets done with the juvenile court, etc. But the Dems can't make that connection.
What we need is an army of angry gun owners and parents with expelled kids to descend on Olympia this session and change the statute. Something like this:
:cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss::cuss:
Edited for typo.
