School says deaf boy's name sign looks too much like a gun
Brace yourselves, because this is the dumbest thing you'll hear all day. The Grand Island (Neb.) school district is forcing a 3-year-old deaf boy to change the way he signs his name, because they say his gestures violate their weapons policy. Preschooler Hunter Spanjer's personalized name sign is a registered sign with Signing Exact English -- a modified form of American Sign Language -- and involves extended index fingers that the district says resembles a gun. (And that sound you just heard was our heads exploding from all the stupid.) "We are working with the parents to come to the best solution we can for the child," a school spokesperson said. Um, how about letting him keep his own name? [Source]The school system ultimately relented, but only after advocates for the handicapped became active.
My grandmother and mother both were public-school teachers. All three of my children attended public schools through high-school graduation. But increasingly I am coming to believe that is is not home-schooling parents to need to justify their decision, it is those who are still sending their kids to public schools. I would note, though, that this sort of insanity is not uniformly distributed around the country and that I have not heard of anything like this in my local area.
I wonder, though, how would the Grand Island school system react if any children of the six people named Gunn in the town reported to school. Would the system insist that they change their name?
Endnote: this report, I should note, is from last year, but is so incredibly confounding that I posted it anyway, having followed a link thereto from Prof. Jacobson's post, "The zero-tolerance war on kindergartners."
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