Student turns in BB gun, gets sentenced to group home
Parents, Authorities At Odds Over Punishment
Michael Beam, a student at Yadkin Success Academy in the Yadkin County School System, unintentionally brought a BB gun to school. He has been charged with a felony crime of posession of a weapon on school property. He has also been removed from the custody of his parents and placed in a group home.
Before leaving home that morning, he had moved his school supplies to the bag because his other bag was dirty.
As soon as he got off the school bus, Beam turned the gun in to a principal.
…
[Mandi] Beam said her son, diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is on the school’s “AB” honor roll but was on probation at the school. The BB-gun incident violated the probation.
As it turns out honesty is once again not the best policy and once again administrators have proven that it is better for a student to hide a dangerous or prohibited item rather than alert an authority.
The article doesn’t describe what Michael’s scholastic punishment will be but the Yadkin School Board policy on Student Conduct and Discipline requires expulsion for the remainder of the year.
Any student in grades 6-12 who is found to have possessed, handled, or transmitted any type of weapon or facsimile in violation of state law shall receive a long-term suspension from the Yadkin County School System for the remainder of the school year, unless school officials find sufficient mitigating factors. In grades K-5 the principal may use discretion in determining appropriate sanctions. The principal will file a written report with the superintendent.
Given his probationary status and the fact that they are pursuing a felony charge it is doubtful that they will determine that his turning the BB gun in by himself is a “sufficient mitigating factor”.
(Tip credit to Max Bremer and The Opinion Journal)
I’m wondering how anyone could have missed a BBGun in a bookbag.
Quite easily, silly:
1 He just dumped stuff from one bag to another without looking.
2. The bb gun was in a compartment.
3. Use your imagination.
Regardless, the school admits that he turned it in as soon as he got to school, so that would indicate he did indeed miss the bb gun in the bag.
Here’s one to consider - smart kids who can read the news and this site but are getting bullied at school and who’s parents won’t (or don’t care) about finding alternatives or fixing the problem ‘accidentally’ bringing BB guns into school or ‘forgetting’ to hand their advil into the school nurse…
Result: no more school! And to a smart enough kid, that’s really not a problem.
Harvey, this kids is being removed from his home because he’s been diagnosed with ADHD… he been in a group home since January 8th. For talking out of turn.
The gun shot plastic pellets, and it couldn’t shoot through a piece of paper.
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ/MGArticle/WSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031781043376&path=&s=
Micheal would often disrupt the class by singing, talking out of turn, leaving his desk without permission and making noises. His classmates would encourage him to disrupt class, and he would comply, Mandy Beam said.
Today’s public schools are no places to educate a kid like this.
Today’s public schools are no places to educate a kid like this.
They are no place to educate any kid! If parents love their children, they will pull them out of these insane propaganda camps.
Hell, just encouraging your kids to read books will result in a more thorough and practical education then sending them to the so-called “public schools.”
I definitely agree with Robert. Parents who really and truly love their children should take responsibility and educate them at home. That’s what two old friends of mine will do with their daughter when she reaches school age.
While I can relate to the frustration of those advocating home-schooling - it certainly doesn’t fit every kid and every family situation - and such comments can help add to “its the parents’ fault” shame that gets heaped on the poor folks who have to endure this insanity and yet get blamed for it. My heart goes out to the parents and the kid. Oh for the return of simple common sense and common sense punishments.
I think homeschooling works for some situations and private schooling works for others. However, I don’t like public schooling a bit. Governments, city, state, or federal, should not forcibly take tax money to support a system when private solutions always work better.
My parents paid property taxes to a city with a lousy school system, then had to pay again to send me a private school to get a real education. That’s not right.
And despite what liberal demagogues say, private schools are not only for rich white people. Hardly anyone in my school was rich, and we were as integrated as any school in the area.
Lesson learned:
NEVER EVER try to comply with Zero Tolerance by doing the right thing (like taking it to the Principal or in another case the girl who found a knife her mother put in her lunch and turned it in). Both were punished. So you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
You can’t do “the right thing” anymore because you are not dealing with rational, decent, honorable people anymore. These school administrators are the bottom of the barrel as far as the above is concerned. They and their schools should be avoided.
I believe ADHD is a product of ‘peer discipline’, the 700% growth in ADHD from the thousands to millions in the 90’s began with educating children in groups. Peer leaders are just children who tend to be domineering and are often articulate. It doesn’t make them mature, moral or empathetic with others; it is believed these kids do a public service by ’setting the pecking order’. Other children begin a steady academic and emotional decline because they try to follow child-lead direction.
Scientist have identified some renagade genes that cause children to become bored or annoyed when bullies pick on them.
http://addwarehouse.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/consensus.html
These same psychological deficits in inhibition and attention have been found in numerous studies of identical and fraternal twins conducted across various countries (US, Great Britain, Norway, Australia, etc.) to be primarily inherited. The genetic contribution to these traits is routinely found to be among the highest for any psychiatric disorder (70-95% of trait variation in the population), nearly approaching the genetic contribution to human height
Schools are likely to become the center of national screening for mental health. Lots of well-paid mental health professionals will be required, and the baby boomers are a new target too. Obviously we ‘missed’ a bunch of ADHD old people.
http://www.apa.org/ppo/issues/eneedforhsp.html
A child diagnosed with ADHD is a good reason to ’suspect’ someone is a criminal, but the only accomadation recommended here is while in the courtroom.
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/1997/june973.htm
Canada has suspended sales of Adderall,
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/2005/NEW01156.html
1. This looks like an air soft “gun” … a toy that shoots plastic pellets, do not penetrate a sheet of paper. (although looks like a real gun, and has no place in a school). But it’s not an instrument designed to harm anyone.
2. Brought by accident.
3. Turned in to principal when he discovered that he accidentally had it in his bag.
4. Apparently no dispute of any of the above facts.
This doesn’t sum up to mitigating circumstances?
Local sentiment, 85% in TV station online voting believe the punishment is unfair.
This incident lands an 11-year old into a group home for troubled children?
How could they send kids more of a wrong message? Being honest and turning in your plastic toy gun and the courts remove you from your family?
What do you get for shooting a rubber band in school in this county, the death penalty?
Will someone please think of the children…
The words “think of the children” should never be used in conjunction with a rational for a political program. I think we need to have a new national policy that anyone who uses it gets a firing squad after their…
I was looking at some historical examples of mental institutions in American Society. Parents who are powerless to control the courts when a little boy sings inappropriately could have never expected this. It’s a road this country has traveled before and yes, it did play a role in growing Nazi Germany.
60 minutes article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/29/60minutes/main614728.shtml?CMP=ILC-SearchStories
The Fernald School is the oldest institution of its kind in the country. At its peak, some 2,500 people were confined here, most of them children. All of them were called feeble-minded, whether they were or not.
The people who ran Fernald back in the bad, old days are no longer alive, but many of the victims still are — victims like Fred Boyce, who was locked up there for 11 years. He came back to Fernald with Correspondent Bob Simon.
or
where people simply dissapear
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/national/14remains.html
Long-Forgotten Reminders of Oregon’s Mentally Ill
Cemetery restoration or memorial projects have begun since the late 1990’s in at least 18 states, those involved in the projects say. They include one in Georgia, where up to 25,000 patients were buried in rows and rows of numbered graves without names over more than a century in Milledgeville at what is now Central State Hospital there.
SWP, the link accompanying your ‘renegade gene’ comment is to an advocacy site; no references or footnotes are provided, and even those advocates signing the document (who probably have strong financial ties to drug companies) are careful not to assert causality because they know there’s no basis for it.
This incident is very troubling because it is the first case I’ve seen of parents losing their children over the bogus pseudo-disease of ADHD.
“Drug your child, or we’ll take him from you and do it ourselves.”
Can you say “soma” boys and girls?
Yeah, NAMI advocates for treating ADHD as a disability. It interested me they have a genetic link. This site is just going up; it explains how they find data on a problem that doesn’t exist.
Also see the section Myth Busters.
http://www.adhdtesting.org/
About that “genetic link”
The most forgotten principle in
such areas is: Correlation does not equal causation.
“Drug your child, or we’ll take him from you and do it ourselves.”
Most parents will back down before it’s very public. They begin signing their kids into a mental institution as soon as there’s any sign of emotional outburst at home. It seems kinder, the kid is only there for a couple weeks while the doctors adjust their meds. If you had a problem, you would never admit it there. Parents are agressive about using these facilities because they are afraid of the schools.
They call you at work every day and make you listen to your child crying. Kids come to your house and tell you your child is being attacked by bullies; kids who play happily with your child all day and don’t want to go home. Teachers lock your child in an in-school suspension room with a violent bully and leave (the bullies know they cannot attack school property, but they can attack another child).
The teachers who support the program are nearly always motivated by a job. The substitute who wants a job, the teacher who isn’t ready to retire or a teacher flooded with the most difficult children feels empowered. The teachers union claims it it 2 or 3 kids in every class that is distroying the school system, but fail to analyze the methods that produce failure.
People just aren’t that hard to motivate, when good people don’t know each other they are inclined to make grevious mistakes.
wait a minute i have ADD and i went thru public schools perfectly fine i had a 3.98 gpa and that is not the point here the point is , is that he accidently took a bb gun to school and he turned it in the minute he got there but yet now he is getting taken out of his house which is bull if yadkin county has nothing else to do to their schools except pick on one kid who tried to do what was right then they are the first in this country, they should focus on getting better teachers and a principal with the brain capacity to realize that hes a idiot and shouldnt have that job, second why should anyone have the autority to pull him out of his home in the first place suspend him expell him but they shouldnt be able to pull him from his parents if the people yelling about public schools being “insane propaganda camps” would open their mouth to the right people instead of bashing the schools i went to from K-12 on a forum full of people that can do nothing maybe something would change. now at this time im going to go find who i have to talk to , to see if there is a way i can help this kid and then how i can get a hold of that principle
I am Michaels grandmother, and the zero tolerance law has not only affected my family in this manner but I have been shocked at the cases across the U.S. my research began when Michael became a victim. I am aware that we need such a law but common sence has to prevail when it involves a plastic toy or rubber band or even a drawing on paper. I would never have dreamed such a thing could happen but trust me it could happen to you,we have to band together and write your state reps. congress, govenors and even the president of which I have. There is an epidemic of injustice pouring down on our children and we must stop it. Please write, there are links online where you can send e-mails all the way to the president PLEASE I AM APPEALING TO EVERYONE TO LET PEOPLE IN OFFICE HEAR WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS
Hi my son is going through almost the same identical thing that this child has faced. My son inadvertantly took a different book bag to school that had a clear toy that shoots plastic pellets in it. We were in the process of moving, and I just threw some of his stuff in the book bag since he was carrying a different one to school. He was suppended from school and I had to go to a school judicial hearing that sentenced my child to go to a school for 6 months that was designed for juvenile delinquents. He had to do 20 hours of community service in addition. He completed the 20 hours of community service, and is now is due to return to regular school. Yesterday, I just received a petition from the juvenile court to appear in court. My son is charged for carrying a weapon within a school safety zone and it is deemed a felony. I know that my child was unaware that the toy gun was in the book bag, because it had some shorts and a short in the bag as well. I even forgot that the toy gun was in the bag. When my child took the bag, he looked in the bag and saw the shirt and shorts and decided to take the bag to gym. He was stopped in the hallway at school while trying to change one of his electives to gym after being told by the school counselor that he needed to confirm with the coach whether or not he could come during that time and to report back to her so that she could make the necessary changes in his schedule. While doing so the school’s vice principal stopped him and asked where he was going or coming from. He told the vice principal that he just left the gym and was going back to the counselor’s office because he was changing his class to gym, and had to take the new schedule back to the coach showing the changes. Then he asked my son what was in the bag. My son replied his gym clothes. The vice principal then searched the bag and discovered the toy gun. That is when all of this started and now my son is facing a felony for not even knowing that the toy was in the bag he referred to as his gym bag. I don’t know what exactly to do at this point. I know I do need an attorney. After reading this article for sure. But I would have never thought that something so innocent would become a blown out, dragged out case against a child in middle school and deemed as a felony just because he wanted to take gym.
Zero tolerance promotes zero intelligence decisions on the part of administrators and teachers who just want to pass “difficult” kids along to somebody else. We now have a literal “school house to jailhouse pipeline” (google that term and read up).
Small wonder so many parents whose taxes pay for bullying sociopath educators to verbally and sometimes physically abuse their children and who cannot affort private school have taken to homeschooling. Just one more example of the state making steady inroads into our lives. Don’t even get me started on the abuse of psychostimulant drugs coerced onto parents by school personnel who are too stupid and lazy to deal with normally active little boys.
Too many of the public schools are a disaster, and it isn’t due to the fact that “Today’s Child” is so vastly different from “Yesterday’s Child.” It all has to do with internal corruption, lack of ability and will to confer meaningful educational benefits on children who are deemed to be “difficult,” incompetence, laziness, and the internal culture of adult bullying that exists in too many school systems from the top down.
I have personally witnessed teachers at inservice meetings talking, laughing, balancing checkbooks, and grading papers instead of listening. When students behave that way in their classes, they want the little problems hanged, drawn and quartered–how dare a kid act like a kid?. “Do as I say not as I do,” just about sums it up.
Good luck to you with your child’s problems. I have worked in the public schools for 25 years and mercifully will retire soon. The only thing I will miss is the kids!