For Immediate Release: September 23, 2022
Zero Tolerance = Zero Common Sense: Sixth Grader Reported to Police for Flashing Toy Gun During Zoom Halloween Game
MATTHEWS, NC — Warning that misguided school zero-tolerance policies can have disastrous ramifications for students’ future academic prospects, The Rutherford Institute has come to the defense of a North Carolina student who was denied admission to a charter school based on an improper and unlawful suspension in his records arising from an incident two years earlier.
The incident arose in 2020 after the sixth grader was suspended from school and reported to police for possessing a look-alike weapon and making a threat after he briefly displayed a toy gun during a virtual Zoom class as part of a Halloween game when instructed by his teacher to look “scary.” Although school officials subsequently agreed to remove the unlawful suspension from the student’s record, they shared details of the incident two years later with a charter school to which the child was admitted. In once again coming to the student’s defense, Rutherford Institute attorneys warned that negligently distributing false information which causes harm to a student’s standing and reputation could constitute defamation.
“Young people are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, tasered, and treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Clearly, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools.”
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