I’ve long maintained that schools can be overly sensitive to students and guns.
It’s one thing when a gun is on campus. It’s quite another when students are disciplined for guns off campus, and that happens way too often. They forget that these are legal products that one can own, share with their family, and the schools have no say in the matter at all.
As such, I was prepared to take the family’s side in a legal dispute involving a student found with a gun near campus. However, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than that.
Rumors and reports of guns in and around Broughton High School brought the historic Raleigh campus to a standstill right before Halloween.
A Broughton freshman was found with a loaded handgun near campus on Oct. 28, triggering an increased police presence that day as well as on Oct. 29, when a false report of an active shooter sent the school into a lockdown. School leaders say a message needs to be sent by taking the rare step of expelling the freshman who had the gun.
“We cannot afford to begin making exceptions for these infractions or we compromise the very fabric of our schools and the immense steps we are all taking to provide safe secure environments for all of our children so they do not have to fear a loaded firearm while they’re on campus,” Broughton Principal Janiece Dilts said at a November school hearing.
Details about student disciplinary action are generally not public record. But the family of the Raleigh student filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court in June to try to overturn the expulsion. The student is referred to as J.S. in court documents.
The expulsion could have lasting negative impacts on the 17-year-old’s future, according to Carlton Powell, the family’s attorney and director of Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Right To Education Project.
“You can have your feelings about bringing guns to school,” Powell said in an interview. “Nobody wants that. That’s terrifying. But should you indefinitely remove them from having any chance of having an education — and that’s what an expulsion can mean. The answer should be no.”
The problem, though, is that while the kid wasn’t found with a gun on campus, the situation in which he was found with it makes things interesting.
See, he and others left the campus during school hours to go to a local store where they intended to buy and smoke marijuana. While there, the teen reportedly pulled a handgun out of his backpack to show to his friends. When police saw the group and what they were doing, they approached, which prompted the teen to run.
He was caught.
Now, he faced charges in juvenile court, so we don’t know what those charges were, but the parents claim he wasn’t charged with having a gun on campus.
Yet let’s also be real here. He likely had his backpack with him when he went to school. He took it with him when he and his friends left to go score pot. He pulled the gun out of that backpack.
Yeah, he probably had it on campus. He just didn’t get caught with it.
Also, this wasn’t a case of some kid posting a picture of himself with a family firearm while living a block from school. He was caught with a firearm he had no business with at a time when he should have been in school. That alone may well be enough to justify his expulsion.
And honestly, since the records aren’t public, that might actually be why he was expelled. This also might not have been a single incident, but the last in a series of disciplinary matters where there was really nowhere else to go.
The Parkland killer had a long history of discipline issues, and the school did pretty much nothing to address them. We saw how that worked out, so maybe I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the school isn’t overreacting this time.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is fighting to dismantle the Department of Education and ensure America’s kids get the education they deserve.
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