Should the school district have a protocol for notification of police/sheriff’s office?

Yes. They should both have a protocol and a policy, because when the situation develops, you’re not going to react rationally.

What should the protocol be? The teacher or aide that discovers it should notify the principal, because it’s the principal who’s responsible for the safety of the students.

What should the policy be? The principal is required, under the law, to notify law enforcement officials if a felony has occurred. Conspiracy to commit murder is a crime. If a citizen has knowledge that a crime has been committed, not reporting it is called misprision of a felony, and it’s a serious crime.

It’s not clear that a conspiracy to commit murder has occurred. It’s not one when screenwriters get together and decide to kill a fictional character. It’s not one when kids play cowboys and indians, whether they have cap guns or they simply cock their thumbs, point their index fingers and say “bang”.

Nine-year-olds normally cannot get their hands on sticks of dynamite. Nine-year-old kids normally can’t figure out how to make a stick of fresh dynamite explode. (If it’s OLD dynamite, the nitroglycerine in it will crystallize, and in that case, it’s pretty volatile. If it’s fresh dynamite, you can pound it with a hammer, or toss it in a bonfire, and it won’t explode.)

And it’s going to be difficult to put a stick of dynamite in a beach ball. For one thing, when you cut the hole to put the dynamite in it, it collapses.

I think you’ve got a case of cowboys and indians, not conspiracy to commit murder. But that doesn’t mean it might not evolve into a crime they can commit.

Schools practice zero tolerance these days, and children learn what they live. The other kids are displaying zero tolerance to your kid’s oddness.

Schools like zero tolerance policies because it is easy for the school administrators to deal with. There are no decisions. And since 93% of all school administrators are former coaches, they don’t deal well with having to make meaningful decisions; they have a fixed policy of passing on the first and second downs, running on the third, and punting on fourth.

Should the parents of the object of a threat have a vote on notification?

No. The school is responsible for the safety of their students while at school, and school officials work for the children and for the district, not for the parents.

Besides, it can take a long time to contact parents. My wife had the school nurse phone a parent to bring some chap stick because her kid’s lips were to the point of bleeding. It went to voice mail. She never came. Oh, I never got the message, she said; my phone has a dead battery, and the charger was at home, not at work.

The school can’t prohibit parents from notifying law enforcement officials - but parents can’t prohibit school officials from following the law.

Would y’all want the kids who threatened your kid, entirely on paper, assigned to a court officer and put through the Juvenile mill — we’re talking fourth grade here.

In the 1950s, yes. In this decade, no.

He only got one day suspension, and his parents are probably the most upset

Of course, it’s his parents that are the most upset. He gets a vacation from school, which is fun, but they’ve got to take off a day from work, which is expensive.

I’m against suspension from school, and for suspension in school. They need to have small rooms in which they can put kids, with their school books, a desk, a chair, and nothing else. You don’t lock the door, but the door opens into a room where an administrator, a secretary, a librarian, or someone else is sitting at a desk. Boredom is an incredibly effective deterrent.

But all four kids should have gotten punished, not just one. The ones that go along with a bad idea are just as culpable as the one that invents the bad idea.

Two have already talked to me and are heartsick and dealing seriously with their kids and the question of what made this seem like a good idea. But if i “pull the lever,” all four go through the whole routine . . . and end up in diversion, recommended for mediation, and handed over to the other mediator, natch.

I’d really like to have not been the one to make the call on this one, especially as i’m still figuring out what the heck was going on the playground the last two weeks, anyhow. My own recollections are that we all had knives at school and played mumblety-peg in a dirt patch next to the asphalt (”you boys be careful over there!”), but that ominous threats to kill someone were reserved for Richard Widmark on the black-and-white movie at 3:30 when you got home, waiting for Barbara Eden in “I Dream of Jeannie” reruns to come on the syndication channel.

Or am i editing? Could be. I love my kid, don’t much like 2008 right now.

When it comes to juvenile court and professional intervention and monitoring, it strikes me as entirely reasonable in this case. One assumes that, when some horrible and non-sensical school massacre actually happens, that it is the result of some sort of awful progression….and that working to prevent the beginning of such a progression, or acting decisively to arrest and reverse such a thing upon discovery - is altogether reasonable.

Truly, this stuff scares me.

I get called by my nine year old son’s principal this morning. Long (long) story short: four boys formed a “Kill (Name) Club” and made up a membership roster with a map and diagram of a truly childish beachball with dynamite stuck in it, with the four signatures.

My assertion that my wife and i have no interest in filing a criminal (or civil) complaint can’t stop the need to a) suspend the four boys or b) notification of the Sheriff’s Department, since they made a map, no matter how crude, and they used the k-word. And it came to the attention of the principal and superintendent on the one year date of Virginia Tech.

Should the school district have a protocol for notification of police/sheriff’s office? Should the parents of the object of a threat have a vote on notification? As it happens, they’ll likely have a policy before this week is over, but my saying “let’s figure out what took us from playground teasing to let’s threaten to kill someone” didn’t prevent the Sheriff’s office from getting notice. I work for a Juvenile Court, and i’m still very torn over this.

Would y’all want the kids who threatened your kid, entirely on paper, assigned to a court officer and put through the Juvenile mill — we’re talking fourth grade here. I want to know what made them go from teasing my son about being cheerfully odd (he is) to using the word “Kill” in their artwork.

The good news in all this — one of the four who signed the “Kill (Name) Club” membership roster and map went to the teacher within 24 hours to say “there’s something going on that you should know about,” which kicked loose this whole weird day. He only got one day suspension, and his parents are probably the most upset, and that’s the kid i’m most worried *for* when the other three get back to the classroom next Monday. And i’m very proud of him, and did my best to communicate that to his distraught parents who called this evening. He probably kept the other three from digging themselves an even deeper hole — just drawing a gun or a knife through a bleeding heart, with crayon accents, would have taken this right up to felony level adjudication. Which i hope the other parents get about what this boy did for their sons, let alone my own.

Rattled and baffled i am, and wisdom of any sort is welcome.

At least, I can count on you to eventually deliver the link so that my childhood memories can rest easier. Thank you, Thank you. And I will not start rambling on about Cleveland television of my youth, because I only watched the news anyway.

Can’t wait to get back home this weekend and make my own 9 year old watch it with me. Then, he will understand a little better why I am the nerd that I am.

That’s one of the three I got wrong.

I had a really hard time trying to see any difference between some of those. For instance, the Starbucks logo.

And they faked me out with the BMW logo, because the fake one looked like someone spent a lot of time in PhotoShop trying to model the surfaces, while the real one wasn’t modeled at all.

Yes, Dorothy, thanks so much for the Ashley update. Hana updated his page today, and it sounds like the kids are taking it pretty badly (she said one daughter had cut off most of her hair and her son lost his best stuffed animal and cries for it constantly). I wish I could offer them more than a few bucks. I’m glad the wolf isn’t at the door, but at the same time, they have a lot of rocky ground to cover before they’re anywhere close to OK. (As Marcellus Wallace might say.)

I was ridng the other day and a bunch of Zeppelin was cued up on the iPod and on came “When the Levee Breaks.” Man, whenever I hear that song I think of Ashley. Not only because of New Orleans and Katrina, but some other things too. For instance, the song mentions going to work in Chicago and it also mentions that the tragedy of a levee break is enough to make a mountian man leave his home. I do believe Ash lived in Idaho for a while. Perhaps even the mountainous region. Anyway, the song is a real touchstone for him in my mind. Makes me sad.