When school starts in Somerset, Massachusetts next week, elementary students will face a new rule that bans any talk or gestures of weapons, according to WBZ News.
Though the punishment for such talk or gesturing has not been stipulated, children will not be allowed to mimic guns with their hands or talk about other weapons like knives on school grounds, WBZ News reported.
“So there have been several cases where kids on the bus are making gestures and we didn’t have anything in there to discipline them,” Timothy Plante, Principal at Somerset’s Chace Street Elementary School, told the school committee. (RELATED: Media Outlets Claimed A Florida School Banned A Poem. It’s Still Available)
Plante said the rule highlights the desire of all three elementary schools in town to curb violence, WBZ reported.
But not everybody in town thinks the new guideline is needed.
One concerned parent, Andrew Speeckaert, whose son is starting kindergarten next week told WBZ that, “The fact that they’re trying to control speech, I think, is ridiculous beyond words.” He added, “[t]he fact that they’re trying to do it with children as innocent as kindergarteners. I don’t really understand what the intent there is.”
But Principal Plante says, “[k]ids nowadays are saying things probably inappropriate or so forth. It could be video games, it could be TV, but it’s not appropriate in our schools.”
Speeckaert, however, doesn’t agree. “It’s absolutely silly. It’s foolish. Why should you keep them in a shell? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Somerset schools reopen Wednesday.