The PC police strike yet again, this time at a middle school in the Palmetto State.
Hillcrest Middle School student Rhett Parham brought a hand-drawn picture of a bomb he illustrated over the weekend to the Greenville, S.C., school, FOX Carolina reported. The boy, who is autistic, began showing his drawing to older students, who reported him to school officials and subsequently suspended him indefinitely, Rhett’s mother, Amy Parham, said.
“They actually reiterated to me they knew he was non-violent,” Amy Parham told FOX Carolina. “They knew he was not actually having a bomb, or creating or making a bomb. But that they could not go with out making an example of him and without having some kind of action because they were concerned about their perception. Perception is actually the word he used. He said, ‘perception is reality, Rhett, and parents might think you have a bomb or [might be] violent.'”
Rhett Parham, his mother said, is a big fan of the video game Bomberman, and drew the device closely resembling that in the game.
When asked about the incident, Greenville County Schools spokesman Oby Lyles said the district could not comment.
“We cannot comment about an individual student,” Lyles told FOX Carolina. “In global terms, a special education student is suspended pening a manifestation hearing which determines if the behavior is due to the student’s disability.”
The South Carolina Department of Education reiterated Greenville County Schools’ sentiment, saying it is “left up to the local school district to investigate the issue…”
The incident has left some questioning the school’s reasoning, while others stand behind officials’ decision to suspend Rhett Parham.
“I fail to see how a drawing of a cartoonish pic of a ‘bomb’ by a child constitutes a threat, never mind a special needs child,” Nancy Hoover wrote on FOX Carolina’s Facebook page. “…This is beyond ludicrous.”
But viewer Audrey Dalton Price disagreed, saying this case was a knee-jerk reaction in a post-Newtown, Conn., world.
“I’m going to probably make some people mad, but I think we should consider the fact that the man who shot up that CT school was autistic,” she wrote on the network’s Facebook. “The children who reported the picture to the principal probably worried about the fact that a special needs child bringing a picture of a bomb to school and pointedly showing it to everyone meant something more than, ‘Hey, look at my drawing.'”
