A Catholic elementary school principal in Cincinnati suspended a 6-year-old boy for three days late last week because he used a pretend bow and arrow on the playground at recess.
The imaginative first grader attends Our Lady of Lourdes School, reports local NBC affiliate WLWT-TV.
The recess incident that led to the suspension occurred on Thursday. The unidentified boy drew back a bow he had invented purely in his mind. He took aim with this nothingness at a friend. He then released a completely nonexistent arrow from some make-believe quiver.
All of these actions made sense in 6-year-old-boy world because the boy and his friends were pretending to be Power Rangers at the time.
Our Lady of Lourdes School principal Joe Crachiolo responded to the boy’s act of imaginary play by promptly suspending him.
“I have no tolerance for any real, pretend, or imitated violence,” Crachiolo declared in a letter he sent home to the boy’s parents. “The punishment is an out of school suspension.”
The parents, Matthew and Martha Miele, are unhappy with their son’s three-day suspension.
Martha Miele said she tried unsuccessfully to reason with Crachiolo.
“I didn’t really understand. I had him on the phone for a good amount of time so he could really explain to me what he was trying to tell me,” she told WLWT. “My question to him was ‘Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a 3-day suspension under the circumstances that he was playing and he’s 6 years old?'”
Crachiolo courageously refused to reconsider his decision to suspend a little boy for playing with a totally make-believe bow and arrow.
“He told me that he was going to stand firm and that he was not going to change it,” the frustrated mother told the NBC affiliate.
The suspension began on Friday and ended on Tuesday.
“I can’t stop him from pretending to be a super hero. I can’t stop him from playing ninja turtles. I can’t stop him from doing these things and I don’t think it would be healthy to do so,” Martha Miele told WLWT.
“I think he’s a good principal. I just think a bad decision was made,” Matthew Miele told the station.
Crachiolo, the principal says in a biography about himself that he is a longtime resident of Cincinnati. He has a cat named Snowball and likes to play golf.
It’s been awhile but, in recent years, America has witnessed a rash of teachers and school principals who have bizarrely punished students — primarily little boys — for having things that represents weapons but which no reasonable person could construe as weapons.
An incident very similar to the pretend bow-and-arrow kerfuffle occurred in 2013 at Mary Blair Elementary School in Loveland, Colo. when a 7-year-old boy got suspended because he lobbed a pretend grenade — probably heroically far — toward make-believe bad guys on the playground during recess. (RELATED: Seven-Year-Old Boy Lobs Pretend Grenade During Recess, Gets Suspended)
In May 2013, school officials at Dowell Elementary School in Lusby, Md. allegedly interrogated a kindergartener for over two hours after the boy brought a plastic, orange-tipped cowboy-style cap gun on a school bus because he “really, really” wanted his friend to see it. Worried sick about the pop gun, school officials called the boy’s mother. By the time she arrived, the stress he had undergone caused him to wet his pants. (RELATED: Kindergartener Interrogated Over Cap Gun Until He Pees His Pants, Then Suspended 10 Days)
In March 2013, school officials at Park Elementary School in Baltimore, Md. suspended an 8-year-old boy because he nibbled his strawberry breakfast pastry into something resembling a gun. School district officials later refused to remove the incident from the boy’s permanent academic record. (RELATED: Second Grader Suspended For Pop-Tart Shaped Like A Gun)
In November 2014, an Arizona couple pulled their 8-year-old son out of a charter school after school officials threatened to expel the boy for his colorful drawings of a ninja, a soldier and a character from Star Wars. All three impressively-drawn figures are clutching guns and knives. (RELATED: Principal Threatens To Expel Third-Grader Over These Awesome Drawings)
In January 2013, at D. Newlin Fell School in Philadelphia, school officials reportedly yelled at a young student and then searched her in front of her class after she was found with a paper gun her grandfather had made for her. (RELATED: Paper Gun Causes Panic)
And back in 2012, officials at Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Maryland suspended a 6-year-old boy for making the universal kid sign for a gun, pointing at another student and saying “pow.” That boy’s suspension was later lifted and his name cleared. (RELATED: Pow! You’re Suspended, kid)
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