The day after police say a 14-year-old was arrested Georgia’s Apalachee High School, a radio report about that murderous attack began to play as I drove my 7th grader to school. She wanted to know if anybody had died. I said, “I think so,” deliberately avoiding giving her the details that two students and two teachers were dead. She had just recently participated in her school’s “See Something, Say Something” campaign and had recently had a lockdown drill, and I felt sick with the realization of how much she’s been forced to think about threats at school and what she’d do if one arose.
It was upsetting to hear what a Catholic school in Virginia Beach did when an 11-year-old told officials there that a classmate had brought a bullet to school.
That’s one of the reasons it was so upsetting to hear about what a Catholic school in Virginia Beach did when an 11-year-old 6th grader told officials there that a classmate had brought a bullet to school. He should have been effusively thanked for reporting what he saw. But in a move that epitomizes the trend in American schools of making innocent actors outlaws, the principal, who reportedly commended the boy, at the same time, punished him with a suspension. His waiting two hours for the opportunity to make the report anonymously, they said, was unacceptable and warranted punishment.
It filled me with a rage to think that our daughter, or anybody’s child, would be made to feel bad in such a situation.
Worse still, the boy who reported that his classmate had brought a bullet to school was given the same punishment — a 1-1/2 day suspension — as the boy who brought the contraband. To punish the boy who alerted school officials to a possible danger is by itself indefensible, but to give the other boy the same punishment renders their actions equivalent. It beggars belief that officials at St. John the Apostle Catholic School are acting as if they are.
But school officials and leaders of The Catholic Diocese of Richmond are defending their actions. “Failure to report a safety concern affects the safety of everyone in the school,” Leslie Winneberger, a lawyer for the diocese, wrote in a letter obtained by The Washington Post. “… The school cannot, and will not, take chances when it comes to student safety, especially true in light of the school shooting in Georgia this past week.”
But thanking the boy who reported what he saw and using his delay as an opportunity to emphasize the importance of acting with urgency would not have represented the school taking chances. It would have been humane and gracious and in keeping with the school’s mission to provide a “Christ-centered learning environment” with a focus on students’ “moral development.”
What Christ-centered message is St. John the Apostle communicating here: that rain falls on the just and the unjust?
All schools have a role to play in students’ moral development. They should all foster — and at a minimum not impede — students’ discernment of good and bad and right and wrong.
All schools, not just religious ones, have a role to play in students’ moral development. They should all foster — and at a minimum not impede — students’ discernment of good and bad and right and wrong. But whether it’s pre-kindergarteners getting suspended for hugging or elementary students getting sent home for playfully shaping their fingers into a gun, we’ve witnessed a trend over the last couple of decades of school officials letting their fear of being sued justify their punishing undeserving students.
When you add those decisions to policies that criminalize certain hair styles, and demand that students eat lunch without talking to one another and remain just as quiet while walking the halls in perfectly straight lines, there seems at times to be a concerted effort in our country’s schools to stamp out any and every sign of young people’s humanity. And to replace their human-centered sense of right and wrong with the latest download from the school’s risk-management team.
Not only is punishing a boy who alerted school officials to his classmate’s bullet likely to give the entire student body a warped sense of ethics, as an attorney hired by his mother rightly points out, it sends students the message that they’d be “better off not saying anything,” as reported by the Post.
The last thing school officials should want is students who are fearful that reporting something suspicious will get them in trouble from school officials who say they took too long. For many students, the fear of getting in trouble — especially suspended — may be a the worst thing they can imagine. I was such a child, and I don’t think our daughter is much different. And while we may hope that a student who senses a threat rightly prioritizes school safety over fear of getting in trouble, the best way to encourage them to make that a priority is to remove from them the fear of getting in trouble. Ironically, the boy waited till the end of a standardized test — which the educational establishment has succeeded in convincing students are all important — before he said anything. For many students, the fear of getting in trouble may be the worst thing they can imagine. The mother of the boy who told school officials what he knew says he wanted to make the report about the bullet quietly, “because one of the things he didn’t want was to be bullied and didn’t want to be labeled a ‘snitch,’” but because he and the other kid disappeared from their classroom at the same time and they served their suspensions simultaneously, his peers quickly figured it out. Speaking of a warped sense of right and wrong, a North Carolina man was arrested after officials say he emailed a bomb threat to St. John the Apostle and caused officials to shut down school for two days. It should go without saying that nothing justifies threatening a school, and school officials are right to be angry at the threat. But that arrest does nothing to address the anger from the mother of the boy who was wrongly suspended or ease the fears of parents who may fear that their school will adopt a policy just as wrongheaded as St. John the Apostle. We all want our children to be safe. But we don’t want them to be made out as villains if they try to keep their school safe but don’t do it quickly enough according to some ridiculously arbitrary standard.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
