Boy’s “wish” to blow up school warrants suspension, court says


A New York school district acted properly in suspending a 10-year-old boy who during a class exercise wrote in crayon that he wanted to “blow up the school with the teachers in it,” a divided federal appeals court said, Reuters reports. The boy, then a fifth-grade student at Berea Elementary School in Montgomery, New York, about 75 miles north of Manhattan, had been suspended for six days by the Valley Central School District for his September 12, 2007 crayon message. The incident occurred when the boy’s science teacher distributed pictures of an astronaut and asked students to write a “wish” in the astronaut’s left leg. Other students laughed when they learned what the boy, known as “B.C.” in court papers, was writing. The boy’s parents William and Margaret Cuff sued, saying the suspension violated their son’s First Amendment right to freedom of expression…

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