The little squirt is in trouble

Wednesday 09-20-2006 4:40pm
(AP)

A Missouri mother is angry that her first-grader was suspended from school over a plastic toy gun. "I asked her, 'You're going to suspend my son for 10 days for this? He cannot harm a soul with this,'" said Danielle Womack, whose son, Tawann Caskey, was suspended from Milton Moore Elementary School in Kansas City. Tawann was suspended over a 2-inch plastic squirt gun. "She told me it's a weapon, a little girl saw it and reported to a teacher that he had a weapon," Womack said.

A spokesperson for the Kansas City School district explained that when a student makes a verbal acknowledgement that they have seen a "weapon", it becomes a Class IV code of conduct violation, which is an automatic 10-day suspension. When queried about potentially making a logical determination as to whether the "weapon" in question is indeed a weapon, the spokesperson said, "We don't have a by-law that permits case-by-case analysis. A weapon was reported and we are within our rights to enact the punishment".

Now blogger-folks, just when you think our nation has reached new depths of idiocy, read on...

Yesterday I heard about this on an Orlando-based talk radio station. A teacher from the Florida Coast called in to say this: "You have to understand how the school system must react. Let's say for example this plastic toy had liquid explosive in it instead of water..."

He went on for a minute or so to dumbfounded silence from the talk show host and I can only assume thousands listening in their cars on the drive home. I'm fairly certain most listeners thought the caller was spoofing the host, but after a few questions it was apparent the caller was serious. According to the brain surgeon/educator/WMD specialist on the radio, young Mr. Caskey of Kansas City could have been a terrorist attempting to blow the entire school up.

And I just felt a monkey fly out of my arse.