(Photo credit: Wavy.com)
Sometimes, I wonder about people and what they are thinking about when they choose to execute stupid actions. Just in case you haven’t heard the story, there was a sixth grader by the name of Adrionna Harris who got suspended from Bayside Middle School for confiscating a blade from one of her classmates. According to the news, the little girl witnessed her classmate using the blade to do harm to himself, cutting his arm with blade until he bled. She took the blade away from him and went to the guidance counselor to report what happened. Sounds like a good deed, right?
Welp, a ”genius” at the school felt otherwise. Instead of praising the young girl for doing the right thing by preventing a classmate from causing permanent damage to himself or possibly committing suicide, they chose to suspend Adrionna due to their “zero tolerance” policy. According to the policy, there is zero tolerance for any child caught with a weapon and if any child is caught with one, there is the possibility that they will get suspended and expelled from school. It would be great policy if we were dealing with some type of Columbine or Virginia Tech school shooting but if a student is caught with a weapon because they CONFISCATED the weapon from someone that was doing harm to themselves, shouldn’t the school have used common sense in this case?
Would it have been better for the young girl to not have intervene at all and just let the classmate kill himself with the blade, right there in the classroom? If that had happened, would the young girl get blamed for watching the incident and choosing not to say something? Who hired these educators to be educators if they don’t even have common sense? If anyone should’ve been suspended, it should’ve been the one that chose to bring the blade to the school. Furthermore, who is this ”guidance counselor” who couldn’t understand that Adrionna was trying to save someone’s life? How are you a guidance counselor and you can’t even guide yourself thru this equation to understand what the young girl was doing? If Adrionna went to the guidance counselor to report the issue and then she got suspended, this means that the guidance counselor was the one that went to either the principal or someone else of authority to report that Adrionna had a blade in her hand. Did the guidance even bother to explain WHY the young girl had a blade in her possession or just the fact that she had a blade?
I understand that most schools have picked up a zero tolerance policy for safety purposes but when we’re talking a saving a human life, people at the Virginia Beach school board really needed to put on their thinking cap for this one. After a week of Adrionna being suspended from school, the school board decided to lift the suspension as of Friday and cleared the incident from her record. That’s great…but there shouldn’t have been a record in the first place had anyone been thinking about what the young girl was trying to do. It seems like this school was so focused on their policy being followed, that they threw common sense out the window. I do believe that all schools need to be strict when setting guidelines to protect their students but there should also be guidelines set in place to protect the students from the foolish thinking of adults, whenever that child does something honorable. Thank you very much.
Sonica
Copyright © 2014 by Sonica Jackson
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