Congratulations to the teachers and administration of Tiogue School in Coventry, Rhode Island, a “Blue Ribbon School of Excellence where Everybody is Somebody for Some Reason or Another!” The way you protected children from the very real dangers of little, tiny, plastic simulations of weapons glued to a hat was just marvelous. Your death-grip embrace of zero tolerance rules regarding weapons is an example to us all; someday we can all make ridiculous, well-intentioned decisions without having to overtax our brains with things like common sense and context.

Which is awesome. Life is easier when you don’t have to think too much.

Christan Morales says her son just wanted to honor American troops when he made a hat decorated with an American flag and small plastic Army figures.

But the hat ran afoul of the district’s no-weapons policy because the toy soldiers were carrying tiny weapons.

“His teacher called and said it wasn’t appropriate because it had guns,” Morales said.

Morales’ 8-year-old son, David, was assigned to make a hat for the day when his second-grade class would met their pen pals from another school. She and her son came up with an idea to add patriotic decorations to a camouflage hat.

Earlier this week, the Tiogue School in Coventry sent the hat home with David after class. He wore a plain baseball cap on the day of the visit instead.

Superintendent Kenneth R. Di Pietro said the principal told the family that the hat would be fine if David replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn’t have any.

“The issue for us was, can it be done in a way that didn’t violate the zero-tolerance for weapons?” he said. “Nothing was being done to limit patriotism, creativity, other than find an alternative to a weapon.”

Superintendent, you, sir, are an idiot. In no sane mind do little army men even marginally qualify as weapons or as dangers to your school students. The teacher who turned the child in deserves just as much criticism, but I find myself running out of polite, family-friendly words for the thoughts in my heads.

If they ever wondered why some folks have worried at handing over their children to the care and mercy of our public schools, well, this helps illustrate the point. Until school administrators can fully engage their own brains, how can we possibly expect them to successfully educate our children?

While the individual school’s rules might differ (I couldn’t find a copy online), the district lists as an example of their school rules a zero-tolerance for weapons rule (link opens a pdf in a new window):

Weapons or items that could be used as weapons (including toys) are not allowed in school (zero tolerance and is often an offense that requires out-of-school suspension)

From the same document, we get the district-wide rules on drugs and weapons:

Drugs, Weapons, Inappropriate Materials:
For the safety of all students and faculty and based on state regulations, students may not bring to school drugs or weapons of any kind. Students who display behaviors that represent danger to other students, regardless of the fact that a weapon may be a toy or utensil or that a drug or illegal substance may be later identified as non-threatening, will be addressed through disciplinary action up to and including suspension. Every student deserves to learn in a safe and threat- free environment.

Could the little army men glued to the hat really be used as a weapon in any more of a useful sense than, say, your typical spork could be used as a weapon? Unless the school has drastically different language (and language that would be even more utterly stupid if it is so broad as to include army men in the range of things that could be used as a weapon or even manage to be meaningful simulations of real weapons), then the teacher and administrators somehow judged that, yes, those toys were a real hazard to other children or to their learning environment. Which is, in the most polite term I can imagine, just silly.

Read the story.

Update: Check out Jen’s post. Complete with graphics.