guess this can go here
also should we have a separate general gun control/gun violence thread instead of just adding to this one?
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An 11-year-old boy was punished this month for reporting a classmate for having a bullet at school because, according to administrators, he waited too long to do so.
School officials at St. John the Apostle Catholic School in Virginia Beach suspended a sixth grader for 1½ days for waiting about two hours to report a bullet his friend had shown him, according to Tim Anderson, a lawyer representing the boy and his mother Rachel Wigand.
News of the boy’s punishment led last week to threats of violence against St. John’s, a two-day closure of the Catholic School and the arrest of a man in North Carolina accused of making the threats, all while administrators tried to reassure parents who might find the whirlwind “deeply unsettling.”
School officials defended the punishment, saying they held the boy accountable for the kind of delay that could have catastrophic consequences if not relayed to adults, citing
the recent school shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., that killed four and injured nine. Anderson contended that punishing the boy for “doing the right thing” makes the school less safe by disincentivizing students from coming forward.
“The message it sends is, instead of ‘See something, say something,’ the kids are better off not saying anything,” Anderson said, adding that “it’s creating a more dangerous environment.”
The Catholic Diocese of Richmond, of which St. John’s is a part, defended punishing the boy.
“The school’s culture of safety requires that students and adults alike report potential threats as quickly as they are made aware of them; in a real emergency, gaps in reporting time — especially hours-long gaps — could have major consequences for school safety,” the diocese said in a statement.
On the morning of Sept. 5, Wigand’s son’s class prepared to take a standardized test by moving desks into a different formation, Anderson said, and while doing so, a classmate showed him a bullet. Wigand said the other boy was showing it off after finding it in his parents’ coin jar, and her son didn’t perceive it as a threat.
Even though he was shocked, he decided to wait until he could report the bullet anonymously, Wigand said. So he took the standardized math test for the next 1½ hours, then attended an art class which the boy with the bullet was also taking.
A fire drill followed, during which Wigand’s son went to interim principal Jennifer Davey to tell her about the bullet, Anderson said. Police came to the school, searched the other boy’s bag and found it, he added.
The principal commended Wigan’s son but also told him he was being suspended for two days because he hadn’t made the report immediately, Anderson said. The other boy was suspended for the same amount of time, he added.
Wigand said that when her son had told her why he’d been suspended, she suspected he wasn’t telling her everything and interrogated him.
“There’s no way somebody would suspend you for reporting something,” she said, describing her reaction at the time. “I couldn’t believe it.”
But Wigand confirmed what her son had told her when she spoke to the principal that night at a school open house. She reviewed the student handbook, found nothing about a requirement to report anything other than sexual harassment and pointed that out to school officials, Anderson said. The principal was nevertheless “adamant” that her son be punished, the lawyer said.............
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/1...S&cvid=ffdce8bf842548c98c1c0486792d859b&ei=18
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/17/bullet-suspension-virginia-beach/