By Chris Freind
Fire them. Fire them now!
It is time to immediately boot all school administrators who had any involvement in suspending a five year old kindergartener from the Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. And we should require that their official employment records always — ALWAYS — disclose the exact reason why they were terminated. Hopefully, such a scarlet letter would prove so weighty that their education careers would sink into oblivion.
Come to think of it, they should be barred from ever working around children again. Judgment, discretion and common decency are — or at least should be — mandatory skills for those working around our young people, but appear to be nonexistent in the Mount Carmel District.
And what was the child’s offense? What was so ignominious, so dastardly, so outright diabolical that the Mount Carmel brain trust saw fit to suspend her for ten days and mandate she undertake a psychological evaluation?
Did she swipe the school computer password to inflate her show-and-tell grade? Boycott naptime? Not share her crayons?
Far worse. She talked about using her pink Hello Kitty Bubble Gun — admittedly, a device that has been known to completely eradicate sad faces with one trigger pull.
That’s it. Case closed. Crucify her!
Honest to God, this makes the Manti Te’o story look tame.
*****
Earlier this month, while waiting for a school bus, the kindergarten mastermind was overheard talking about shooting a classmate with the bubble gun, which, it should be noted, she did not even possess.
For that, she was actually accused of making a “terroristic threat” and branded as a “threat to harm others.” According to reports, the girl was questioned the following day for 30 minutes without a parent present, and, her mother stated, was told she could go to jail for making such a threat. Despite being evaluated as “normal” by the District’s psychologist (what a surprise), the student was suspended anyway. Officials have since reduced the suspension to two days, but have refused to expunge the incident from her permanent record.
The family’s lawyer, Robin Ficker, simply wants the incident removed from the child’s record and the school district to apologize, admitting it made a mistake. But no can do.
The District is fighting back, having released a statement that reads, “…we are confident that much of the information supplied to the media may not be consistent with the facts in this matter. The Mount Carmel Area School District has investigated the issue and will continue to do so…When given the opportunity in the appropriate forum, we look forward to presenting information that will portray our school district in a more positive light.”
What are they doing? Bringing in the CSI team?
Assuming there are no national security secrets in this case, this one is simple. School administrators wildly “jumped the gun,” choosing to bow at the altar of political correctness and get their fifteen minutes of fame rather than rationally think this situation through to its logical conclusion. And now they are too proud to admit they screwed up. In the process, they have traumatized a little girl, stigmatized her family, and perhaps worst of all, stolen a bit of childhood innocence from every student in that school.
And the more we sit back and allow these situations to occur, the faster America will decline. It is not enough to have the lawyers settle this behind the scenes, even if the girl and her family “win” everything they are seeking. The damage is done, and nothing short of firing Superintendent Bernard Stellar and other administrators complicit in the suspension will make it right.
Is advocating the firing of these officials for their “zero tolerance” …. itself zero tolerance? Absolutely. And it should be. We all make mistakes, which is why God made erasers, but mistakes like this are unforgivable. We entrust these people with our most precious gift: our children, indeed our future. And when they cannot even handle the most basic, common sense situation, it is time for them to find another profession.
But, sadly, America is becoming a nation that doesn’t act in common sense, decisive ways, but one that overreacts to damn near everything without actually solving its problems. That way, faceless bureaucrats can feel good about themselves and justify their existences.
It’s time to fight back. It’s time for the silent American majority to be heard. It’s time to send the message loud and clear that political correctness is the greatest enemy this nation faces, and that we must enact zero tolerance for moronic decisions that so negatively affect the most innocent among us.
Demand that the Mount Carmel School District administrators be fired, and burst their politically correct bubble once and for all.
Chris Freind is an independent columnist, television/radio commentator, and investigative reporter who operates his own news bureau, www.FreindlyFireZone.com His self-syndicated model has earned him the largest cumulative media voice in Pennsylvania. He can be reached at CF@FreindlyFireZone.com
