16 Year Old Arrested for Writing About Killing a Dinosaur for School Project
“This is a perfect example of ‘political correctness’ that has exceeded the boundaries of common sense.”
Legal Insurrection has covered the new zero tolerance policies in American schools before, but this is a case you may have missed last week.
Sixteen year old Alex Stone of Virginia was given a writing assignment on the second day of school. When he wrote an obviously fictional account of killing his neighbor’s pet dinosaur with a gun, he ended up being suspended from school and arrested.
NBC News 12 in Virginia reported:
Police, lawyer release statements on student’s alleged dinosaur killing
Attorney David Aylor, who is representing 16-year-old Alex Stone, said his client’s arrest over a creative writing assignment on Tuesday was “completely absurd,” and is seeking to appeal the suspension and “proceed with the legal issues of [Stone’s] arrest.”
“This is a perfect example of ‘political correctness’ that has exceeded the boundaries of common sense,” Aylor said in a statement released on Thursday.”Students were asked to write about themselves and a creative Facebook status update – just days into the new school year – and my client was arrested and suspended after a school assignment.”
The Summerville Police Department who arrested Stone on Tuesday on a charge of disorderly conduct is disputing Stone’s account of his arrest.
“The information that is being reported is grossly incorrect in reference to what led to the juvenile being charged,” said Capt. Jon Rogers in a Summeville police statement released on Thursday.”The charges do not stem from anything involving a dinosaur or writing assignment, but the student’s conduct.”
Stone said he and his classmates were told in class to write a few sentences about themselves, and a “status” as if it was a Facebook page. Stone said in his “status” he wrote a fictional story that involved the words “gun” and “take care of business.”
“I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business,” Stone said.
Here’s a video report via Truth Revolt:
Where does this madness end?
It’s a good thing Michael Crichton didn’t attend this school.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
There’s just SO much dumb here. Dumbest of all is the policy. The kid doesn’t seem too bright, either. But I want to know what nahell any teacher’s doing a “special project” that pretty much is a phony Facebook page. That’s a great idea, ain’t it? Give the kids homework that closely resembles the way they waste time doing something other than their homework!
Smithee-the Common Core ELA standards push real world writing and put media literacy as being just as important as traditionally understood literacy. Updating a Facebook page combines media literacy, digital literacy, real world situations, and the writing is in context and has a purpose. Then this student treats it as a prank and involves a gun to boot.
I have English profs telling me they are being told to give college credit now for Tweeting as just another form of communication. South Carolina is heavily influenced now by the SREB’s High Schools That Work vision that combines basic literacy as a goal with vocational skills. That same model is being nationalized under a federal letter that went out from the Secretaries of Labor, Education, Commerce, and HHS to all Governors and mayors on July 24, 2014. Think of it as While You Were Vacationing, Instead of Sleeping.
Facebook, tweetering, etc are all life skills and thus part of rolling CTE into the academic core for all students without anyone noticing. We all do need to notice even when the foolish administrators are not overreacting and treating prose as a criminal matter.
That’s what happens when schools hand out masters and doctorates in education routinely now on the basis that the holder is Competent to be a Change Agent. No, I am not kidding. I am quoting from the standard course of study description. South Carolina is particularly bad because every ed school in the state is part of John Goodlad’s National Network for Educational Renewal. It’s all about using K-12 education foe transformational change in the broader society. I quote Goodlad’s declared intentions a lot in my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became A Weapon.
” Then this student treats it as a prank and involves a gun to boot.”
/eyeroll
Snark and sarcasm being otherwise absent from modern media.
Never mind that my own high school predilection was to push the envelope whenever possible. My defense being that it was they who chose to feed me a diet of Wilde, Voltaire, Rabelais, etc. So what else could they expect?
And his actions only ‘involved’ a gun to the same extent that Candide involved a vagina.
Michael Crichton? Think what would have happened to Ernest Hemingway.
This is all Steven Spielberg’s fault.
Let’s see now..
Fill in the blanks with your choice or choices of descriptive words between:
“completely _______,______,______,_______ and this one ends with an _______ A! absurd”
Sorry. There’s no end:
Some girl in Tennessee got in-school suspension after saying “bless you” to a sneezing classmate.
Any reports of anyone being suspended for saying “Gesundheit”?
Back to School.
Back to Madness.
Assuming what the PD says is true ( and I am inclined to believe it is true) there’s something else going on here. What conduct is the PD talking about?
Not all the facts are present here.
I suspect the kid mouthed off to the teacher.
Since when is mouthing off to a teacher cause for arrest?
True, it does sound like the kid may have acted stupid, but it seems to me the point is, if the school hadn’t suspended him for completing his assignment, he wouldn’t have been it that situation to begin with.
…he ended up being suspended from school and arrested.
It doesn’t say “arrested and suspended from school.” Another point not mentioned: did the teacher give guidelines on what was acceptable, and what wasn’t, when he/she gave the assignment? Did the boy violate written/verbal rules of conduct, in completing the assignment? Or, was it just that the teacher was offended by what he wrote? As is the case in most of the stories like this one, there’s still a lot of unanswered questions.
Unanswered questions is right. I wouldn’t rush to conclusions until we have more information.
Not sure what the legal standards are in that state for arresting a juvenile. Usually a paper arrest is what is done unless its particularly egregios
I found this editorial from a Charleston paper yesterday, Aug 22. The author has the same question about details of the arrest. No details.
I’ll bet the school and cops are consulting with the White House on how to handle stupid decisions.
I saw this earlier in the week. Insane!!
Note: you need to correct your post. Summerville HS is in South Carolina, not Virginia:
Reading between the lines, the boy was arrested for his behavior after being suspended or perhaps behavior towards the teacher that resulted in a suspension as well as an arrest. We don’t know the school’s rationale for the suspension and they may not be able to discuss it.
And thus opening the door for speculation, innuendo, outrage.
There’s a lot that need to be changed in our schools.
Another site suggested that during interrogation, the victim blew up and verbally lashed out at his tormentors. That is what he was suspended for. In other words, he had too little tolerance for the whims of the educators and cops, and insisted he was an American. It was less being thrown out for using the Forbidden Word, but for not kissing enough arse afterwards. “You will respect my Authoritah, serfie boy.”
This has nothing to do with Zero Tolerance idiocy, nor with hysteria after the Sandy Hook shootings. It is not idiocy. It is deliberate. It is a tactic. Idiocy is just the smoke screen. This is a program to condition, to terrorize, to brainwash our children into fearing and hating guns, patriotism, and Americanism. If the Liberal Vermin can ruin our
children, they have won.
Highly plausible, if yet still unconfirmed.
The leftists that have taken over the education system like to play at creating “free thinkers” but will mercilessly stomp down anyone who fails to display requisite obeisance or declines to toe their ideological line.
Would it have been any different if he’d just written something like “I killed my neighbor’s radio-controlled pet dinosaur – I bought the gun to take care of the business.”?
Or just, “I killed my neighbor’s pet – I bought the gun to take care of the business.”?
I sort of think that whenever a teenager uses the words “kill” and “gun” in the same paragraph, it’s going to get flagged for extra scrutiny. And probably should.
I find it troubling that a teen would joke about killing a neighbor’s pet. Not so much about the mere mention of a gun.
Sure, he used “dinosaur” to fictionalize the pet, but still a “pet”. It would be different if he maybe told about walking through a park or in the woods and suddenly a dinosaur leaped out and he killed it.
Sounds like this kid has some issues with his neighbor and he is venting them through his “status” update assignment. That should be cause for concern (but not arrest.)
I suspect he was arrested for an outburst at the teachers rather than the story itself.
Just like with the Ferguson issue, people are rushing to see exactly what they want to see and need to see, in order to preserve their own precious narratives. The police spokesman said that the kid was arrested for his conduct, not his written words.
Just as we had to wait on the facts to make an intelligent guess on the Furguson incident, there is probably something important that we are missing here. Brown was NOT shot for jaywalking, and this kid was ( probably) NOT arrested for his ‘creative’ writing. The more outraged you are at this early date, the more foolish you are likely to look when the facts finally come in.
Now I can’t get this song out of my head:
I killed a dinosaur, I killed a dinosaur.
Open the door, get on the floor
Everybody kill the dinosaur
Open the door, get on the floor
Everybody kill the dinosaur
The motto of the South Carolina Department of Education is, “Thank God for Mississippi!” which usually keeps us from being #50 among the states.
Want better public education? Get the government and unions out of running it. SC doesn’t have the union problem, but you would never know it by the way the educrats run the schools.
One source of the problem nationally can be seen in SAT scores.
In 1998, the average high school senior scored 1058 on the SATs. But the average graduating teacher with an Ed. degree had scored only 970.
It’s not impossible to teach someone smarter than the teacher, but when the average student is smarter than the teacher, it’s close.
I cannot say that I am shocked by those numbers.
I do not doubt their accuracy either.
But I would like to know the source. Can you link please?
I am not doubting, I just want to read more.
That is some head of hair.
Hopefully, this kid and his parents take the same advice smart people are probably giving Rick Perry: exploit this opportunity and turn it against your oppressors, and profit from it in the process.
I agree – the kid probably should have been uspended for that mop on his head if nothing else.
More than one parent has thought of committing Barney-cide after the theme song once too many times.
Should have been arrested for the Bieber haircut alone.