I feel sorry for this grandmother, but I also think she's fooling herself about the "goodness" of her kid:
Two boys in his 4th grade class kept "messing" with him, the boy said, so when his older brother gave him a stolen 9 mm pellet gun, he stuffed it into a book bag and took it to his Sauk Village elementary school. "They kept saying they wanted to fight me," the 9-year-old said as he sat on his grandmother's couch in a red basketball jersey and black sneakers. "I told the teacher three times, and she didn't do anything."
The gun was discovered after a teacher caught him playing with BB-gun pellets during math class, the boy said. She turned him over to the dean at Strassburg Elementary School, who asked if he also had a gun.
"I said, 'I'll be honest,' so I said 'yes,'" the youth said. He was expelled from school for two years after the March 2 incident. Now his grandmother, Sheila Howard, 53, of the 2100 block of 221st Street in Sauk Village, is suing the school for depriving her grandson of the right to an education.
"They told me they've got a no-nonsense, no-tolerance law, and that's it," Howard said. "I couldn't understand that. How could they do that to a kid?"
He is a "good kid," Howard said. "The most trouble he caused--when you asked him to do something, it would take him all day."
Well, he managed to put that gun in his backpack pretty darn quickly, didn't he? I mean, the grandmother should be mad that the teachers didn't do anything, but the kid brought a gun to school - given to him by his older brother, no less - for the purpose of intimidating (at the very least) another kid. Does the grandmother really want to teach the kid that he is the innocent victim in this situation?
I do believe the kid is in some way the victim here, but mainly of his grandmother, who doesn't seem to be worried that he is getting guns from older siblings and is already, at age 9, looking at a gun as a problem-solver.
Posted by kswygert at August 23, 2004 02:29 PM