An Ohio high school student says he tried to remain nonpolitical during school walkouts over gun violence and was suspended for a day because he stayed in a classroom instead of joining protests or the alternative, a study hall.
Hilliard senior Jacob Shoemaker says school isn’t the place for politics, and he wasn’t taking sides Wednesday.
The district says it’s responsible for students’ safety and they can’t be unsupervised.
Jacob’s citation for not following instructions was shared online by a friend, prompting a flood of messages to his father.
Scott Shoemaker says some people thought his son was suspended for walking out, and angry comments accumulated, including some that mistook Scott for the principal. He says he also got a couple death threats and had to consider switching phone numbers.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
5 Responses
Whoever is responsible for this suspension should be terminated immediately, even if this follows up the decision to tree to political offices. It is one thing that a school deviates from its mission to allow a political activity. But to penalize a student for not engaging in these kinds of things is unacceptable to a moral mind. If I was on a board of directors of a school where this happened, the pink slips would come without hesitation.
What’s outrageous? The school is perfectly correct.
As the article says, he wasn’t suspended for refusing to walk out, he was suspended for refusing either of the two alternatives he was given — to walk out or to go to a study hall. When I was teaching in a public high school, the rule was that we were not to leave students alone in the classroom. Would YWN call it outrageous if a student was suspended for staying put during a fire drill?
rt, your Bolshevik tendencies are shown. It is perfectly OK with you and people of your ilk to use young and naïve students for your political agendas and brainwashing propaganda. This is how communists always operate.
A few quotes from other web sites:
> On the night before his school’s walkout, Shoemaker told his father that he wasn’t sure about participating and that school officials were, in some respects, pressuring students to pick a side.
> Shoemaker added that he wasn’t the only student who felt this way. School district officials said that “well under” half of the student population participated in the walkout — but that the majority of students were “comfortable and confident” in their decision not to participate.
I would ask whether the walkout was an official school function, in the same senses as field trips. If yes, then who authorized it and why. If not, the teachers should be in the classroom along with the students.