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Home > Blogs > Middletown School News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > May > 02 > Entry
Disabled weapon permitted at school
In today’s Journal, I wrote about a situation at Middletown High School last week where a student had brought a disabled, unloaded antique gun to school for a history class presentation with permission from Principal Dennis Newell.
In an e-mail to staff sent last Thursday, Newell acknowledged that some students and staff were alarmed when they saw the rifle case the student had the antique weapon in.
The student had made the request in advance and after some consideration, Newell approved it.
Some have expressed concern that the student was allowed to bring the piece to school at all. Newell set up several guidelines for the student to be able to bring the weapon. Read more about those guidelines after the jump.
Newell required that the student remove the “bolt,” which meant that the gun was disabled and could not be fired. The gun also had to be unloaded.
The student was not permitted to bring the weapon on the school bus and had to have his parents drop him off and pick him up at school that day, which would also likely ensure that his parents knew what their student was bringing to school.
Newell and the resource officer met the student when his parents dropped him off and the school’s resource officer took the disabled weapon, kept in a rifle case, and locked it in his office until the student’s history class. The resource officer took the gun to the class.
This is where the slip-up happened. At the end of the class, the resource officer had not returned to take the antique weapon back to his office for the remainder of the day.
Instead of waiting for the resource officer, the student took the weapon, in the rifle case, to his next class, where he showed it to some peers. When students and teachers saw the rifle case, they were “alarmed,” according to Newell’s e-mail.
Newell told me Monday that the student was very happy to be able to share the antique weapon from World War II with the class and that it was a “great learning experience.”
One teacher who contacted the Journal said the student should not have been allowed to bring the weapon at all, no matter what, and that a diagram or picture could have been used in place of the actual antique gun.
A friend of mine who works at the Ohio Department of Education told me that about once a year they will hear about a situation like this, where someone allows a student to bring an disabled gun to class to use in a presentation.
What do you think? Should the student have been permitted to bring the disabled antique to class?
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