When a 6-year-old girl, a kindergartener with Down Syndrome pointed a finger at her teacher and said, “I shoot you,” the school called the cops on her. She’s 6 years old and has Down Syndrome. Does anyone really think she posed a threat to the teacher?
The teacher and the principal at Valley Forge Elementary School in the Tredyffrin/Easttown School District didn’t think so. But they still called the police anyway because “it’s district policy.”
As the child’s mother, Maggie Gaines said, “This is insane.”
Darn right it’s insane.
As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the incident happened in November but became public last month when Gaines went to a school board committee meeting and criticized the policy as “criminalizing ‘age-appropriate, nonviolent behavior of an elementary school student.’”
A copy of the mother’s remarks can be found here.
In part, she said, “On Nov. 19, Margot, who has Down Syndrome and often struggles transitioning between activities, was asked by her teacher to do something she did not want to do. At one point in her refusal, she pointed her finger at her teacher and said, ‘I shoot you.’
“I imagine the utterance was not unlike the instances when I’ve told her it’s time to go to bed and she says, ‘I hate bed. I hate mommy.’ As most parents can attest, I have learned not to take offense. For I know that a short time later she is usually cuddled up to me, while we read bedtime stories and exchange kisses and cuddles before saying good-night.”
But the teacher took the child to the principal who convened a threat assessment team. That team determined the threat was transient with no intent to harm and recommended no disciplinary action. But they called the cops on the child anyway.
The story has gone national, at least to some degree. The Washington Post picked it up and, as Reason.com writer Robby Soave wrote: “Lawmakers and policy architects frequently suffer from failures of imagination: They presume their laws and policies will be followed in exactly the manner they intend. But the officials who carry out and enforce said policies do not always exercise good judgment. Instead, they over-comply with the policy and follow it to the letter, which produces absurd results like these.”
If the student had been an otherwise healthy male high school student with a bad attitude, OK, maybe authorities should have been called since that is more likely to be a real threat. But this was just a politically correct panic reaction to an insignificant nonevent.
Let’s call a time out on such reactions, just as there should have been a time out called for the little girl.
About Rich Schwartzman
Rich Schwartzman has been reporting on events in the greater Chadds Ford area since September 2001 when he became the founding editor of The Chadds Ford Post. In April 2009 he became managing editor of ChaddsFordLive. He is also an award-winning photographer.
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