If pencil sharpeners are outlawed, only outlaws will be able to take those fill-in-the-bubble tests
Pencil sharpeners banned after attack
A student at Waterloo Primary School in Ashton under Lyne dismantled a pencil sharpener and used the blade as a weapon, slashing another student across the neck. The school’s response? Nothing short of unbelievable.
The attacker was suspended for two days and is now back in school.
Police, who were notified two days later, have spoken to the young attacker and his parents.
Headteacher David Willis has now banned all pencil sharpeners.
They have banned pencil sharpeners. Banned pencil sharpeners. One more time - they banned pencil sharpeners.
The problem here was not the pencil sharpener. It was the wannabe Jack the Ripper who manipulated an ordinary tool to craft a weapon. Would the absence of a pencil sharpener have prevented this kid from his meticulously planned assault? Do they think that a kid who figures out how to use a pencil sharpener as a weapon will have any difficulty in using another tool in a similar fashion?
Normally I’m in the position of arguing against punishments but two days suspension for a meticulously planned assault with a razor blade is ludicrous. The school is unapologetic and defends their actions on the basis of being “inclusive”.
Tracy Buckley, the school’s head of governors, has written to all parents, saying the school understood the gravity of the incident and acted accordingly.
The letter states: “The school, like every other school, has a duty to promote ‘inclusion’ of all pupils. The emphasis of the (DfES) guidance is that a permanent exclusion is discouraged and to be considered as a last resort in very extreme circumstances. A fixed period exclusion was entirely appropriate for the circumstances.”
Lord forbid we hurt the attacker’s feelings. It’s far more important that he feel ‘included’ in the school than he learn just exactly how serious it is to attack another student with a blade. And if slashing a kid’s neck with a razor isn’t an extreme circumstance I’m genuinely afraid to ask what is.
(Tip credit to Belmont Club via Resource Investor)
You must be joking!
I hope nobody gets stabbed with a sharpened plastic spoon from the cafeterial. The resulting ban will make it virtually impossible to eat Jello — and will create a true conundrum on the days that the cafeteria serves soup.
Again… never underestimate the ability of administrators to be stupid….
But…. what does this have to do with zero tolerance? It is just another example of bad administration. This kid should be expelled and arrested. Perhaps the courts can get him the help he needs to not become a psychopath.
barry
Barry:
Just HOW many times does Jim need to tell you that this is NOT exclusively a zero tolerance website. He’s told you that at LEAST twice.
Zero INTELLIGENCE, not zero tolerance.
Read the whole thing, Barry — the response to the attack was to institute an zero tolerance policy for pencil sharpeners.
So what happens if one student attacks another by using a pencil as a stabbing weapon? Ban pencils (and all other writing implements)? I got into an eraser-throwing fight with friends in my younger days and accidentally hurt one of them. I guess the school officials would have had to ban erasers from the school because of that if “zero tolerance” had existed back then (about 15-20 years ago).
Pencil sharpeners banned in British school
This unbelievable story comes to us via Zero Intelligence, a blog that I really need to stop reading if I want to keep the welt on my forehead from growing after banging it against the desk in frustration so much
If they suspend all pencil sharpners, how the hell are students supposed to sharpen their pencils? Will they all use pens from now on? Better yet, ban pens and pencils because those can be used as weapons.
Once upon a time, I stabbed a friend with a pen. I drew blood. The teacher just moved me across the room.
*starts a protest against sharp writing utensils*
Crayons for everyone!
Oh, it gets better:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,141253,00.html
“PHILADELPHIA � A 10-year-old girl was placed in handcuffs and taken to a police station because she took a pair of scissors to her elementary school.
School district officials said the fourth-grade student did not threaten anyone with the 8-inch shears, but violated a rule that considers scissors to be potential weapons.”
So we’re arresting little girls who use scissors in the correct manner, but only giving out 2 day suspensions to kids who try to cut up other kids with pencil sharpeners? WTF?!
Good thing the slasher didn’t have any aspirin on him — he might have been suspended instead.
Hmm… Carry a pair of scissors and get arrested. Slash someone in the neck with a razor blade, and get a 2-day “time out”.
Oh the Insanity
The real irony here is what other sort of weapons policy this is starting to resemble, i.e. is this a school or a penitentiary?
We have one girl (10 years old) kicked out of school for almost 5 days and handcuffed for bringing scissors…. and this lil jerk purposely attacks another kid and goes strait for the next with a razor… 2 little days.
what the f*#k!?
This is why i tell my mother i dont want kids. Not because kids are a pain in the ass but because i dont want them attending this kind of public schooling.
You never know where this will lead. Next they may ban handguns and even pocket knives. Back in my day (many days past) we were taught reading, writing, counting, and geography. Nobody cared about weapons we carried, we were all busy learning.
Something changed and it isn’t human nature nor weapon availability. Something changed in school administration. Search richard.mitchell for more…
i think that somewhere someplace in a university somewhere, people are getting graduate degrees in education administration that somehow require that a lobotomy be administered as part of the internship process.
i am saying this as a former teacher.
there is something about the way we teach people to be administrators in our society that absolutely requires them to agree that part of their brain must go missing.
i think the absurd things that professional administrative personnel do may have something to do with the reality that professional educators at the administrative level somehow become utterly isolated from the realities of everyday life. i believe they live, mentally, in a condition that is not far from that of the Japanese princess who, upon deciding to marry a commoner, discovered that she had to learn how to use money, go shopping, and drive a car.
an institution that is paying an individual to ban pencil sharpeners while ignoring the mind that dreamed of this use for a pencil sharpener needs to go on one of those special three day academic retreats that these institutions enjoy sponsoring so much, and consider this question:
what were we thinking when we hired this person?
If you were the parents of the attackee, how would you feel about the two-day timeout and letting your scarred-for-life (”neck” indicates to me the attacker was out for serious blood) kid go back to class with Sharpener Man?
I’d be furious and I would take my kid out of that school. I’d still call the administrator an idiot for banning pencil sharpeners.
I think the administrative response should have been to expel the attacker and make a rule that anyone else caught with a dis-assembled pencil sharpener or other blade will be expelled as well.
As for the sharpeners themselves, however, back in my grade school days, every classroom had a nice hand-crank pencil sharpener bolted to the wall for everyone to use. If this school has those, then the kids don’t need their own sharpeners anyway. Doesn’t prevent them from attacking each other with more common implements, though.
The headmaster was right. Make sure that badly-behaved kids are forced to stay in school, instead of running loose on the streets. This school is in a rough area with a high truancy rate. See the last Ofsted report at . That kid should not have been suspended at all, but should be given *extra* school time. After all, school *is* prison. (Anyone who says otherwise a) cannot remember, b) was not there, or c) is nuts.) People who break prison rules should stay longer, not get out early. Prisoners who break the rules prompt a lockdown for the entire school, er, prison!
So taking the away the sharpeners was the right thing to do. It may actually have been a bit too lenient. Perhaps students should be forced, en bloc, to work without writing implements at all for a week. No pens, no pencils, no crayons, no computers. All work to be committed to memory, and either recited in class or held in memory for a week until it gets written down. This would accomplish several things. Among them, the young perp would be subjected to an unholy peer pressure, and would have little choice but to straighten up. If the parents don’t like it, they can put their little monsters somewhere that doesn’t care about kids safety or progress. If this were a ‘public’ or church-run school the parents would have little choice but to put up or go elsewhere. As a ‘community’ school, it may be run by the city, and would therefore have a hard time setting appropriate standards. But bravo to the head for trying!
No Links or URLs allowed in comments?
The Ofsted report is available online. A search will find it quickly.
Sorry, Icantrol2. The site is being hit heavily by porn and drug spam and I had to disable code within comments to try to fight them off. You can still put in links, just don’t use brackets or a href tags. That is, just put in the raw url like www.zerointelligence.net.
I tried. It won’t let me. But thanks for the reply…
This is a classic example of WHY I am going to homeschool my kids.
What… the hell?
They expel kids for years for a knife in their backpacks, and they suspend a kid for two days for cutting someones neck?
Are these people retarded?