Christmas Sweater Club Punished At Local High School
Peggy Fox
WUSA-9
Washington, DC
12/20/2010
MANASSAS, Va. (WUSA) — They call themselves the “Christmas Sweater Club” because they wear the craziest ones they can find. They also sing Christmas songs at school and try their best to spread Christmas cheer.
Now all 10 of them are in trouble because of what they did at their school.
“They said, ‘maliciously maim students with the intent to injure.’ And I don’t think any of us here intentionally meant to injure anyone, or did,” said Zakk Rhine, a junior at Battlefield High School.
The boys say they were just tossing small two-inch candy canes to fellow students as they entered school. The ones in plastic wrap that are so small they often break apart.
Skylar Torbett, also a junior, said administrators told him, “They said the candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them.” He said neither he nor any of their friend did that.
Next thing they knew, they were all being punished with detention and at least two hours of cleaning. Their disciplinary notices say nothing about malicious wounding but about littering and creating a disturbance.
“It was at 7 in the morning, before school even starts, so I don’t what we’d be really disrupting,” said Cameron Gleason, also a junior.
Principal Amy Etheridge-Conti says she can’t comment on the students’ discipline but did say there was a lot more to it than handing out candy and that the discipline was warranted.
The boys admitted their incident may have caused litter since some kids dropped their candy canes on the floor. But Cameron Gleason said he spent an hour cleaning up the dropped candy.
The boys’ parents think the school went overboard and maybe administrators were trying to stop their boys from spreading Christmas cheer.
Mother Kathleen Flannery said an administrator called her and explained “not everyone wants Christmas cheer. That suicide rates are up over Christmas, and that they should keep their cheer to themselves, perhaps.”… [Emphasis CAJ]
The article continues at WUSA-9
CAJ note: The irony of this story hasn’t escaped us in that Manassas, and much of Northern Virginia, is home to some of America’s most notorious home-grown Islamic terrorists. Anwar al-Awlaki and Nidal Malik Hasan are just two of the more well-known jihadists from the area. If readers can find articles of Muslim students being similarly reprimanded, please contact our Wordboss and, if they’re credible, we’ll publish them.
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