Ingenious Press – WMAL NewsOWINGS, MD — The father of a middle schooler in Calvert County, Md. says his 11-year-old son was suspended for 10 days for merely talking about guns on the bus ride home.
Bruce Henkelman of Huntingtown says his son, a sixth grader at Northern Middle School in Owings, was talking with friends about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre when the bus driver hauled him back to school to be questioned by the principal, Darrel Prioleau.
“The principal told me that with what happened at Sandy Hook if you say the word ‘gun’ in my school you are going to get suspended for 10 days,” Henkelman said in an interview with WMAL.com.
So what did the boy say? According to his father, he neither threatened nor bullied anyone.
“He said, I wish I had a gun to protect everyone. He wanted to defeat the bad guys. That’s the context of what he said,” Henkelman said. “He wanted to be the hero.”
The boy was questioned by the principal and a sheriff’s deputy, who also wanted to search the family home without a warrant, Henkelman said. “He started asking me questions about if I have firearms, and [the deputy said] he’s going to have to search my house. Search my house? I just wanted to know what happened.”
No search was performed, and the deputy left Henkelman’s home after the father answered questions in a four-page questionnaire issued by the Sheriff’s Office.
Principal Darrel Prioleau did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment. Robin Welsh, the deputy superintendent of Calvert County Schools, said federal privacy rules prohibited her from commenting on a specific case, but she said students are not suspended without cause.
“There has to be some violation within the code of conduct that would trigger some type of consequence or intervention,” said Welsh, who said the county school system does not have a zero tolerance policy.
Based on information about Henkelman’s case provided by WMAL.com, the ACLU of Maryland said the suspension, later reduced to one day, was a poor choice by school administrators.
“It’s appropriate for school officials to investigate when there is a concern about student safety. But based on what’s been described to us, once the school official concluded that all the young man wanted to do was to be safe at school and that he posed no risk to anyone, the suspension was really inappropriate,” said Sonya Kumar, an ACLU staff attorney.
“The school should have been assuring him that they were going to take steps to keep all students safe, not punishing him,” she added.
Henkelman said the incident happened last December right before students were sent home for winter break, but he did not feel compelled to take his story to the public until he learned that a 5-year-old Calvert County boy was suspended for bringing a toy cap gun on a school bus.
“[My son] was very scared at the fact that he was interviewed by the principal and a sheriff’s deputy alone. He didn’t know where I was,” Henkelman said.
The ACLU’s Kumar said there are too many cases of school officials coming down hard on students for relatively harmless offenses.
“Across the board, we are concerned about practices where we have these sort of knee-jerk reactions without really stopping to think and use our common sense about whether what a kid is doing or saying actually presents any sort of concern for the safety and well-being of others,” Kumar said.
Does anyone need any more evidence that we are living in a police state? These stories get more and more ridiculous, it’s like all the common sense in the world has vanished. It’s too bad Henry’s kids are all grown up and out of school, I’d love to see an officer tell him that he’s going to search his house without a warrant. *grins*
Agreed
Well,…
It seems like there is only two things to do at this point:
1) Have T-Shirts for the whole family made with the word, “GUN” written ALL OVER IT!
2) SUE!, SUE!, SUE!!!!!
JD – US Marines – This includes SUING the bus driver!!
“Principal Darrel Prioleau did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment. Robin Welsh, the deputy superintendent of Calvert County Schools, said federal privacy rules prohibited her from commenting on a specific case, but she said students are not suspended without cause.”
Oh but when it involves ME and MY privacy rules, it is disgarded and I am forced to say something, but when it is the company or the schools privacy, OH NO! We can’t say anything and have to strictly follow those rules. WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????
Once again, two sets of rules. One for the individual and one for the company.
Tell them to go to hell and take your kid out of that stupid excuse for a school. They can’t talk about Sandy Hook at their school? Well then how the hell can they prepare for another attack? (if they are claiming that it was real incident, which we all know is a downright lie and false flag as far as the eye can see) So we are suppose to teach our children to just ignore it, not question or prepare for it and hope it doesn’t happen again and if it does, oh well??? And oh yea, keep telling the students that the lesson learned is that all guns are bad. Period??? WTF???
ONCE AGAIN, just more proof that “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” in an Orwellian world!
You can’t say the word, “Gun” at a school any more than you can say the word, “Bomb” at an airport, even if it is in a different context or talking about a story that happened in the past. It’s totally disgusting. That’s one of the reasons why I was detained at an airport by TSA in San Francisco a year and a half ago after coming back from overseas with my wife. I was yelling at them saying, “Why do I need to go through the radiation chamber when I already went through the metal detector and it was fine.” I said sarcastically, “What? Do you really think I have a bomb or something?” and the cop said, “You said the B-word!” I said, “What the hell is the “B-word””. And he said, “you know what it is.”. So I said, “What? Bomb?”. He then yelled again immediately, “YOU JUST SAID THE B-WORD!” I just looked at him straight in the face and laughed and said, “Are you kidding me? Now I can’t say a certain word? That’s against the 1st Amendment. Freedom of speech.” So he says, “You gave up your rights when you entered the screening process and there’s a big sign over there that says you can’t say, “the B-word” in this area? I said, “Well evidently, it wasn’t big enough, since I didn’t see it.”.
In the end, they threatened to press charges against me with a $700-1000 fine and make my life a living Hell for the next few weeks until they let me off with a warning and dropped the charges. I F**KING HATE AND DESPISE the TSA! Rest assured I have never been on a plane since and refuse to do so. F**K THEM and their “B-WORD!” Go hide under a rock if you feel threatened by mere words, you COWARDS!!!
I think part of the plan or psy-op I guess is to have people not know whether they’re saying or doing right or wrong, so in the end they’re afraid of doing anything i.e. they’re afraid of everything they say and do.
Never mind. A slip-knot or hangman’s knot will do for these crud, so we needn’t go beating ourselves up about that, either.
Exactly. Everyday, I walk out and wonder what law I am breaking just by going to the store or what am I doing wrong now, that I can’t even enjoy taking a ride or a walk without feeling that I am being harassed or about to be harassed by someone who thinks he or she is above the law. I hate it!
So where is your pursuit of happiness now, NC? You’ve been robbed.
Ridiculous beyond belief. I guess parents only send their kids to these schools because there’s no one else to babysit them during the day.
If the media didn’t work so hard to scare the kid with their false-flag reporting, which I’m sure dominated all TV channels for a week, he probably never would have said it.
Yes, it is complicated. Society has now been engineered, with most families isolated from extended family and/or both parents working just to make ends meet, that public schools are a place for your children to be, while you are elsewhere. And it can take many parents awhile to wake up to the fact that schools today are nothing like the schools we went to (even though, yes, we were subject to state indoctrination too). It’s much, much worse today.
Homeschooling is not for everyone, but I highly recommend that more people give it a go. I tried it for my kids, I also tried public school and private school. Homeschooling is a lot of work and a huge commitment. Until the kids are in high school and self directed, it is nearly impossible for a parent to work AND homeschool. Or, let’s just say it’s very challenging. And parenting (especially if you have multiple children and/or are a single parent) is challenging enough, already.
I do think though, as more and more parents have their kids exit the school system in favor of homeschooling, creative homeschooling co-op options will spring up, with parents having flexible work schedules and taking turns with the homeschooling. This isn’t easy to set up or arrange, though, and some states do not allow anyone but the parents to legally homeschool. Different levels of freedom exist in the different states, regulating homeschooling.
Just saying, public schools generally speaking are becoming worse by the day, harmful places for impressionable children. But there are real, logistical barriers to homeschooling, facing parents who must work.
It isn’t just the unfairly and wrongly reprimanded child who is harmed; he is used as an example for the rest, who are also significantly harmed. A lot of this harm could be mitigated or undone, if enough outraged observers would speak up and intervene, declaring the emperor has no clothes. Remaining silent is collusion.
But I’m angry and frustrated to be put in this position by the psychopathic cruelty and insane framing of “gun violence” for their tyrannical agenda, duping most people, I am afraid. The position I’m being put in, so frustrating because of course I will step up to the plate, but no, it was not on my calendar to have to take the time to stand up to these bullies. I think they are counting on that, and that too is by design: keep us all so stressed, so sick, so beat down by the relentless tide of infringements, that we feel we cannot speak up against it or fight back.
Well, you got to.
Make it stop, please.
I’m having a very mixed reaction. I’m outraged, of course, at the trauma being done to all of the kids getting suspended, to their families, to all of us, to the other children who are being trained to fear guns, to fear the word “gun,” to fear people who have or talk about guns, to fear anything resembling a gun, the very idea of a gun. It’s traumatic to be punished for doing nothing wrong — indeed, for doing something one believes to be right, if I’m getting the story accurately: this kid was speaking up loudly to say he wished he had been able to save the Sandy Hook children, by killing the perpetrator — which, isn’t that what most of society believes the police would have done, could they somehow have been there at the school at the very moment (assuming this all went down, of course, as reported)? The kid was expressing a fantasy of saving innocent lives. And then he gets punished and not only that, reprimanded and told that he made a serious thinking error, and was a very, very bad boy. This experience will affect him for the rest of his life. How dare they.
This is so messed up, and it goes so far beyond this one kid (or any of these kids in Maryland, especially, being called out for their thought crimes which aren’t crimes or even bad thoughts).
My other thought is that of course this infliction of trauma and cognitive dissonance/insanity is deliberate. Because the logic of any of it completely escapes me. Where is the principal’s judgment? Where are the outraged parents or PTA? Where are the outraged youth protesting in the streets? Why all the complacency? Or are they all too cowed to speak up now, because saying the “G” world or the “B” word or even a hand gesture that means your name to you, but unbeknownst to you now has taken on a new, forbidden meaning, brings harsh, swift retribution and ostracism.
Good Lord.
I see a two minute hate in our near future.
All right everyone, now get back to work. Nothing to see here. Move along.