Soldiering not a fit career at Oregon school
Career day photo of soldier with gun puts school district in a bind
Updated 30 March 2005: School compromises and allows a different picture, also with a gun. Details at bottom of post.
The Salem-Keizer School District has a very strict zero tolerance policy. Not only are weapons, replicas and look-alikes banned but so are images of them. Freshman Shea Riecke of McKay High School ran up against this policy when she tried to put a photo of her brother, Marine Corporal Bill Riecke, on her classroom’s career board.
She wanted to display the picture with those of other McKay grads’ career choices. Riecke’s teacher, Rick Costa, encourages the exhibits.
But Riecke’s photo created a little controversy. Actually, it kicked up a sandstorm of grief for the family and school-district officials because of the photo’s content. It pictures the Marine hefting a big gun while decked in military desert camies (camouflage). It was taken while he was stationed in Iraq; he will be redeployed there this summer.
…
School officials denied the photo on the grounds the guns in the picture violated district policy. Riecke’s mother, Connie Riecke, appealed to district officials including Superintendent Kay Baker. Connie Riecke said she has not heard back from the district but was told that it probably could be displayed if she consented to having the weapons removed, via computer, from the photograph. Riecke said her son insists that it run as it is or not at all. She agrees with him.
Stalin used this photo manipulation technique extensively. Things and people he did not approve of routinely disappeared from photographs.
“I don’t think our school policies are meant to rewrite history. It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Connie Riecke said. “Are they going to go through every textbook and take out pictures of the Civil War that have soldiers carrying guns? Are they going to go through the library and take out all the Time magazines that feature soldiers with guns? I don’t think so.”
To comply with their own policy they would have to, but they won’t. Instead they will classify images of guns in mainstream media and text books as educational and images of guns taken from real life as too dangerous to allow.
Contact information:
Board Chairman Mike Basinger
Board Vice-Chairperson Steve Chambers
Board Director Mark Adams
Board Director Bonnie Heitsch
Board Director Krina Lemons
Board Director Michael Parker
Board Director Craig Smith
Salem-Keizer Communications Coordinator Simona Boucek
Principal Cynthia Richardson
Assistant Principal Susan Rieke-Smith
Assistant Principal Patti Togioka
Assistant Principal Robert Abdou
(Tip credit to Kevin Lacobie)
UPDATE 30 March 2005
Compromise Reached Over Marine Photograph
When is a zero tolerance policy not a zero tolerance policy? When your school gets national attention.
Superintendent Kay Baker has found a way to nuance the school system out of Principal Cynthia Richardson’s gaff. Baker has given his approval to another picture of Shea Riecke’s brother. This second picture also has the Marine holding his weapon but it is acceptable to Baker. It’s all in the nuance.
“It may be that the picture has a gun in it, but it is not the most prominent piece of that picture,” explains Kay Baker, Superintendent for the Salem-Keizer School District.
…
The school’s principal will have the final say on the new picture, but assuming it is approved, the photograph will hang next to pictures of other McKay graduates at work.
Principal Richardson’s approval isn’t an automatic thing. This is the woman who decided that images of weapons are a violation of zero tolerance weapon rules and that the school mascot “may need revisiting” because it holds a sword.
These people are absolute idiots — an embarrassment to this country. Do they go through every history textbook and zap out pictures of guns?
Ummm, I’m just wondering what the school administrators think it is that the Marines DO for their jobs? They don’t hold bake sales, and they don’t create software. You can’t pretend that there is no violence in the world by digitally removing a gun from a photo. And how, exactly, is a picture of a gun a threat to anyone?
I’m wondering who’s going to defend this country if we are ashamed of anyone who tries. What about the police? Does’t this give kids a cartoon understanding of deadly force?
Fun test scenario: Black History Month just concluded - what if a student had done a bulletin board about Brown vs. Board of Education, and included photos of the students being escorted into the school by members of the 101st Airborne, past nervous Kansas National Guardsmen, all of whom had rifles slung over their shoulders? That’s a picture of guns IN a public school. Wouldn’t that put the politically correct ninnies in a pickle?
This story’s getting even better: See http://www.katu.com/stories/76079.html . Turns out the school’s mascot is displayed holding a sword. Now, instead of seeing the irony of the situation, and reconsidering her own ruling on the Marine photo’s ban, the principal responds, “He has a sword. (That is) so true. We might have to revisit that”.
Gonna have to revisit all the history books too, until every “display” of a gun, sword, or bomb has been excised from the photos, Pravda-style.
For many administrators, zero tolerance has devolved into a mindset, instead of anything resembling increased safety in our schools.
Now that I’ve seen the picture in question, the matter isn’t that cut and dried. There is no firm indication in the picture that the three individuals pictured are Marines. You have three young men, one shirtless, one in desert camo, with two weapons, holding them in a manner that is anything but regulation in front of a nondescript plywood wall. Out of context, that picture could be three guys in some Montana paramilitary group, playing with guns after a couple beers.
I had thought that we were talking about a picture of a marine in full BDU uniform, holding a rifle in a non-hey-look-what-I-got manner and standing in front of a military vehicle or an Iraqi building front, not some half-naked yahoos acting like the weapons were toys. The policy reasons are crap, but that picture is inappropriate for a career board, and I doubt even a USMC recruiter would be happy about it being used that way. What the school needs is the guts to come out and say, that picture is not a valid representation of a career aspiration, and be done with it.
And to think, those holding the guns(any and all soldiers)are doing so to protect the rights of all seeking to be free,and are free…even the IDIOTS(not all)employed by many school districts.
This may come as a shock to dweeb, but Marines do not eat, sleep and fight in Dress Blue uniforms. Half naked yahoos indeed.
I didn’t say anything about dress blues.
Why didn’t she post a picture of her brother sitting on the toilet, then, as indicative of
the merits of a career in the Marine Corps.
I’m a software engineer, but if I wanted to provide a picture symbolic of my career, it would be at the office, in professional dress, not a picture of surfing the web at home in my underwear. In that picture, they were not doing the work of Marines, they were blowing off steam after work. Maybe a career board picture for a career in the legal profession should show a doctor at a singles bar on a Friday night, then.
I’ve seen plenty of people’s personal slide shows from Iraq, and there were plenty of pictures appropriate for the context we’re discussing, that depicted weapons, but they weren’t anything like the picture in question.
Hey, if you think otherwise, download and print the picture in question, walk it down to your nearest armed forced recruiting station, and ask them what they think of putting it on a high school career board.
See the update - this is a very reasonable resolution. In the new picture, the Marines in question are clearly on duty, performing the duties of a Marine - far more appropriate for a career board. John Schwab will also note that they are NOT in dress blues, or even clean utilities, as he sarcastically implied I was suggesting.
I might also note that in upon the closer examination of the original photo, the foreground gun appears to be a SAW or other belt fed weapon. As such, it is clearly not designed to be fired from the hip, as the pose depicts, or even from an upright position. This makes the posed picture even more an example of hotdogging, and one could technically say the weapon is being mishandled.
Reading all of these posts, and then viewing the photo, I must make comment.
The three personnel are obviously back at their billet, taking a photo of 3 comrades, posing with their weapons.
A few things. One, this type of pose is not uncommon, just look at poses from WWII through today. The bonds servicemen make in combat are often the strongest bonds they hold in life, as the shared danger makes those bonds permanent. Many soldiers in the past 60 years have photos such as this of them and their comrades.
Of the photo itself, the brother in question is in full uniform. The others obviously are not. The pose is indeed for the camera. However, regardless of the fact of “proper” firing position (and the SAW is OFTEN shoulder fired, as it was created specifically for quick and easy use vice the 7.62 machine guns), at least all persons have observed the safety rules (no weapons pointing at anyone else, fingers straight and off the trigger).
So on to the the career board photo. Could she have used his boot camp photo? Sure. But is this photo inappropriate? I think not. We are a country at war, and a career as a Marine, a very honorable one I might add, is quite often a dirty, violent, and arduous one. But to ban the photo based on depiction of a weapon is over the top. Several photos much like this one will find their way into history books very soon, and one hopes that historical accuracy will triumph over the notion of “non-offensive” photos in these books.