Boys' Bedrooms Are Not School Property

This is either a still from Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”
or a training course for school administrators.
Curmie isn't sure which.

Curmie returns to a topic that was once—and may yet be again—one of the centerpieces of this blog: utterly insane decisions by people running schools. Curmie opens by adapting Mark Twain’s famous line about Congresscritters to the current situation: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a school principal. But I repeat myself.” Alas, there are more than one of these cases, in different locales. 

The earliest incident Curmie can find occurred in June at Seneca Elementary School in Baltimore County, MD. Well, not exactly at that school, and that’s rather the point. Courtney Lancaster’s son Jackson, you see, was attending school virtually because of the pandemic. 

 

So he was set up in his bedroom with his webcam on for a GoogleMeet class, and a couple of teachers and the officious parent of another student took a screenshot which showed “guns” mounted on the wall behind the 11-year-old 5th grader. They contacted the school safety officer, who brought in the principal, who called the police. 

Be it noted: no one suggested the boy was threatening anyone, or even that he was paying the slightest bit of attention to the alleged “weapons.” And this is the boy’s bedroom we’re talking about; he wasn’t on anything approaching school property, much as a lot of school systems might think they are the masters of the realm. 

Anyway, Officer Thomas shows up on the doorstep and asks to search boy’s bedroom. Ms. Lancaster, who knows there’s nothing to hide, allows the search despite the lack of a warrant. It takes the cop virtually no time to ascertain that the alleged arsenal consists of a couple BB guns, an airsoft gun, and some toys. Bodycam footage shows his reaction: “Ma’am, I definitely apologize for bothering you. I had more than you when I was a kid.” Lancaster says the officers “commended [Jackson] also on his respect and understanding of the BB guns.” 

 

Not surprisingly, however, Lancaster, a Navy veteran who might reasonably be expected to demand and indeed implement gun safety on her premises, wanted to know why the principal didn’t call her instead of 911. Side note: Ms. Lancaster was told it was the safety officer who called the police, and school documents show that, as well. On the audio recording of the 911 call, however, the caller identifies himself as “Jason Feiler… the principal at Seneca Elementary School.” In other words, the school is already lying. 

 

The school, predictably, tried avoidance, and when that didn’t work, opted for moronic pomposity. “The safety of students and staff is our chief concern, whether we are meeting in classrooms or via continuity of learning.” And apparently school officials are asserting that having a BB gun hung on the wall of a 5th grade boy’s room is the equivalent of bringing a weapon to school. Um… no, it isn’t. 

 

Lancaster reasonably wonders “So, what are the parameters? Where are the lines drawn? If my son is sitting at the kitchen island next to a butcher block, does that constitute a weapon? It's not allowed at school, right? So, would my home then be searched because he’s sitting next to a butcher block? I feel like parents need to be made aware of what the implications are, what the expectations are.” Curmie would amend this to read “Parents need to be reassured that blithering buffoons like the not-so-brainy brain trust at Seneca Elementary School will never again be allowed within the same zip code as an educational establishment.” 

 

There’s a lawsuit pending, and the school is being intransigent and mendacious. No news there. But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, that’s not all. Not to be outdone in hubristic cretiny, the Jefferson Parish (LA) School system has not one, but two, such cases. Indeed, the reason there’s still discussion going on (and why Curmie can talk about it in something resembling the present tense) is that the school board refused, only a couple of weeks ago, to remove from school records the charges against 9-year-old Ka’Mauri Harrison. 

 

So we’ll start with the Harrison case. Again, this was a BB gun in a private residence, neither a weapon per se nor on anything any rational person would believe is school property. Young Ka’Mauri explains what happened: “My brother walked in the room and tripped over the BB gun and I put it on the side of me.” Those of us with IQs above room temperature (Celsius) understand that the fact that a little of the butt of a BB gun showing up in a virtual environment represents literally no threat to anyone. But we don’t work for Jefferson Parish schools, where common sense is apparently outlawed. 

 

Ka’Mauri was immediately suspended and threatened with expulsion because he… get this… “possesses weapons prohibited under federal law.” Again, the legislation the district tries desperately to invoke to cover for their absurd over-reaction bans certain kinds of weapons on school property. The fact that a BB gun does look a little like an actual gun gun apparently qualifies it as a “facsimile,” so it would in fact be outlawed on school grounds. A little boy’s bedroom is not a schoolroom, even if it has been called into duty to function as such during a health and safety emergency. Sometimes ontology trumps phenomenology. This is one of those times. Stated otherwise, as has appeared on Twitter (Curmie can’t seem to find who said it first), “if this child brought a gun to school, then by the same logic, his teacher is hanging out in students’ bedrooms.”

 

The Harrison family’s admirable response to these shenanigans is two-fold: to seek to restore Ka’Mauri’s good name by appealing the decision, suing, and, importantly, lobbying for a state law to protect the rights of students in cases such as this. The Ka’Mauri Harrison Act was passed unanimously by both house of the Louisiana legislature and signed into law. Gentle Reader, you would not have found your way to this page without the ability to figure this out for yourself, but in the interest of thoroughness, allow Curmie to point out that any legislation that passes unanimously is pretty uncontroversial—there’s always a Rand Paul or Sheila Jackson Lee ready to object on faux principle otherwise. 

 

Add to that the support of both the NRA and the ACLU, and it’s pretty clear that the only people who thought the bill was a bad idea were the Jefferson Parish education brass. To top things off, after the school board petulantly upheld Ka’Mauri’s suspension (after it had already been served, of course), state Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill called the decision “a travesty.” “They ignored their own policy. They just don't seem to learn.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, that. 

Finally, also in Jefferson Parish but in a different school, there’s the case of 11-year-old Tomie Brown, also suspended, also threatened with expulsion, also charged with violating federal weapons regulations, also guilty of nothing more than having a BB gun in his own bedroom. 

 

Oh, and by the way: the teacher admits he never saw the alleged weapon. So we have are forced to rely on the testimony of a bunch of other 9-year-olds, who exclaimed “he’s got a gun!” Curmie wonders how that… erm… evidence would be treated in a real trial, not to be confused with the kangaroo court that passes for a review process in Jefferson Parish. Tomie’s father, Tim, notes that “I … never received any type of documents or rules that they considered my home their property while he was doing a virtual class.” Well, of course not: they consider themselves immune from the kind of common sense dictates required of mere mortals. Mr. Brown also says “If my son had done something wrong, the school system would’ve been the second in line to punish him.” Curmie believes him. 

 

None of this is surprising, but it is shocking. For years, school systems have been falsely claiming authority over any action any of their students take at any time in any place. Curmie doubts that a couple of lawsuits will reverse the trend, but it’s a place to start.  Curmie believes in what his leftie friends refer to as “common sense gun laws”: registration, background checks, making military grade weapons unavailable to the general public, stuff like that.  But he would prefer not to be associated with the Dithering Ideologues (good band name, no?).

There’s requiring training for a potentially lethal weapon and there’s prohibiting boys from having BB guns.  There’s protecting a school’s students and teachers, and there’s claiming dominion over students’ bedrooms for literally no increase in safety for anyone.  If you can’t understand those distinctions, Curmie would rather you take your hand-wringing elsewhere.

 

Curmie closes with a bit of nostalgia. Some 45 years ago, Curmie had a small part in a semi-pro theatre production of Robert E. Sherwood’s play Idiot’s Delight. As it happens, our show t-shirts arrived on a day off from both rehearsal and performance, and coincidentally also when the then-current Woody Allen film “Love and Death” was playing at the local cinema... so, many of the company went to see the movie.  It features a brief scene of a “village idiots convention.” About a dozen of us, wearing our show shirts which featured the emblem displayed behind the “bar” in our production and the single word “Idiot’s,” rose as one to applaud. Now, why would all this remind Curmie of that memory from oh so long ago? Hmmm….