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RapierFugue -> RE: Student suspended for riding horse to school... (11/3/2010 6:54:32 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: flcouple2009
I guess I am going to be the lone voice of dissent. While I think comparing it to a loaded hand gun is completely overboard the parents are idiots.
You trailer a horse over, unload it, and then start parading it around the school grounds without ever talking to anyone at the school before hand. Why would you think that was going to end well?
Well it's not a "hand-gun", but I've seen “previously calm" horses bolt before, and believe me, if a bolting horse hits you you're liable to become pâté in short order. I’d also question whether a school car-park is a suitable area for a horse to be brought into – some horses are fine with cars in a roadside environment as they pass at speed, but become agitated when exposed to them at close quarters, such as in a car park, notwithstanding the fact that access road and car-park looked pretty rural. Bottom line is that a horse has no direct braking system, and the fact it was being led is no guarantee of safety either.
I do think the punishment is completely over the top though – suspended for that? Seems somewhat extreme to me, but then I don't live in the US so maybe things are done differently there? I do know that schools in the UK have become a lot more “suspension happy” over the last few years, and kids are regularly suspended or even excluded for the kind of harmless “pranks” I and my contemporaries used to occasionally play.
I recall a highly unpleasant, balding egomaniac of a deputy headmaster who used to do a “Bobby Charlton” and comb-over what little hair remained ... one day I and a friend set up a wig-on-a-wire arrangement, set-off via a timer and a little electric motor (so that we could be in the Assembly when it happened, thus generating a decent alibi) that gently and quietly lowered a wig onto his head as he blathered on about this and that. Even the teachers and Headmaster himself (a smashing chap, as it happened) were in gales of laughter, and we escaped retribution by keeping very, very quiet about it.
You can imagine my horror when, a couple of years ago, a student in another school here was expelled for a very similar stunt, which was deemed to be “mocking authority”. Since when did mocking authority become a bad thing? Did I miss a vote?
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