A rural Pennsylvania girl has been suspended from kindergarten after she told another girl that she planned to shoot her with a pink Hello Kitty toy gun that bombards targets with soapy bubbles.
Events unfolded last week when the five-year-old girl was waiting at a bus stop with other students, reports WCAU in Philadelphia. Details are unclear, but the girl said something like “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself,” according to Robin Ficker, an attorney for the girl’s family.
The girl reportedly did not have the Hello Kitty gun or any other weapon with her at the time.
School officials in the Mount Carmel Area School District in Northumberland County later found out about the incident and sprang into action. They interrogated the little girl for approximately three hours — without her parents present – according to the NBC affiliate.
The bubble-blustering little girl was originally suspended for 10 days for issuing a “terroristic threat,” according to Fox News. The charge was lowered to “threatening to harm another student” after a meeting between the girl’s mother and school officials, and the suspension was reduced to two days.
The kindergartener also had to submit to psychological testing before school officials allowed her to return to school.
“The psychologist said that she posed no danger to others,” Ficker told the Daily Item, a local newspaper.
The girl’s parents were not pleased with the way school officials handled the incident. They are seeking an apology from the school. They also want their daughter’s suspension wiped from her record.
“All I know,” the girl’s mother told the Daily Item, “is what my daughter has told me and she said she was told she could go to jail, which is a very traumatic thing for a five-year-old to live with.”
“This is a good-natured little girl,” Ficker told WACU. “And this shows how hysterical people who work at schools have become since Sandy Hook.”
“This is a girl who had no idea about killing or what happened in Connecticut,” Ficker added, according to Fox News.
A spokesperson for the school district told PennLive.com that school officials could not release information about disciplinary actions.
Ficker, the attorney for the family, also represented a family in neighboring Maryland after Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School suspended their six-year-old son for making the universal kid sign for a gun, pointing at another student and saying “pow.”
School officials later lifted the Maryland suspension and cleared the boy’s name, according to the Washington Examiner.
