2/05/2005

More on Zero Tolerance Gone Wild

Under the headline of "Child Punished After Finding Toy Gun At Bus Stop: Student Says He Brought Toy Gun To School To Give To Principal":

A Kansas City student is being punished for what he thought was a good deed.

"It came out real fast. I got a good look at it. It really was a gun. Thank God it was a toy gun," 10-year-old Frasier McCart said.

Frasier wouldn't find out it was a toy until later. He said when he first found it, he wanted to make sure nobody got hurt. Just before the bus arrived at the corner, he put the gun in his backpack so that he could give it to school officials.

"I was thinking, 'I'll give it to the principal, she'll know what to do,'" Frasier said.

"It did look like a real gun," Principal Marla Wasserman said.

She said the boy had good intentions, but while making his way through the hallway to her office, he told another student what he had in his backpack. Wasserman said the boy should not have told another student. The boy's mother said he was then suspended. The principal said she then gave him in-school disciplinary action. . . . "It's hard to find somebody that can be honest and do the right thing," said Tracy Johnson. "And to punish him for doing the right thing, that just doesn't paint a pretty picture."