Student punished for saying "bless you" | Fox News

So here is the original hyperbolic rant from Todd Starnes Student punished for saying "bless you" | Fox News , as usual it is lacking in credibility and I'm a bit confused. According to Starnes,

Kendra says she was tossed out of the class and sent to the principal’s office where things apparently went from bad to worse.

“The assistant principal said if I didn’t want to respect my teacher’s rules then maybe my pastor should teach me because my freedom (of) speech and religion does not work at their school,” she wrote.

As you might imagine the school has a very different take on what happened inside that classroom._

Starnes continues by citing this article,

“We can’t discuss discipline issues because of right to privacy of students,” assistant principal Lynn Garner told the Dyersburg Gazette. “But I can say there are two sides to every story. Sometimes people spin things and turn them to make them seem one way.”

The assistant principal said Kendra was sent to In School Suspension as a matter of protocol. She was allowed to leave at the end of the class period.

Which is problematic as no where in this article is there a direct quote attributed to the assistant Principal stating that Kendra was sent to ISS. What it does say is this,

Shortly after, Turner was reportedly instructed to go to the principal's office, where she was placed in ISS for the remainder of the period. The decision by the DCHS administration to place Turner in ISS was one normally followed on a daily basis according to Garner. Once classes changed, Turner was allowed to attend her next class. <--Not a quote

"The majority of the time, when a student comes to the office either voluntarily or was sent by a teacher, they are placed in ISS until the end of the period because we have two supervisors in there to watch them," said Garner. "Also, it gives us a chance to find out what the situation is and what happened in the classroom for them to be in the office in the first place. In this case, this was not a religious issue at all, but more of an issue the teacher felt was a distraction in her class." <--Does not say Kendra was sent to ISS, only what the school's protocol is.

The author of the Dyersburg State Gazette article took the word(s) of the student, Kendra Turner, and misapplied the schools protocol as stated by the DCHS Assistant Principal Lynn Garner, making it look as if Garnerstated that Kendra was given ISS.

BUT,,,

And this is where things get a bit odd and contradictory according to Hemant Mehta, following her initial posting, Kendra added more detail in subsequent online contact (here and  here.)

 Hemant being the diligent activist AND former high-school teacher, called up the Principal Peggy Dodds:

"According to Dodds, Turner was not given an in-school suspension. She wasn’t sent out of the classroom, either — she chose to walk out. And, most importantly, she wasn’t punished by the teacher for saying “God bless you” — however, the teacher did admonish her for “disrupting the classroom.”

Hemant concludes with this,

If Turner’s story is accurate, then sure, the teacher should be reprimanded. It’s not a crime to say “God bless you” and students have every right to practice their faith at school (without causing distractions).

But we’ve heard stories like this before, and they’re almost never accurate. It helps to hear what all sides have to say before jumping to any conclusions.

There's more, Hemant's follow-up.

The ACLU also had this to say in their overview of the incident so far,

Now, it is worth noting that Kindle may have opened herself up to criticism with a posted list of banned words. Perhaps she was listing words that students commonly yell out in class. But rather than picking and choosing what students can or can’t say, she should simply have a policy that prohibits disruptive outbursts of any kind in class. That way no one can claim discrimination. (By the way, whatever happened to raising your hand if you have something to say in class?)

Unbiased media outlets really need to take note of Mehta’s work. Rather than running with a report based mostly off of a kid’s social media post, they have an obligation to get both sides of the story. In this case, many news outlets were far too easily satisfied when the school either declined to comment or didn’t immediately respond.

And finally the possible impetus behind it all,,,

But I suspect there’s more going on here. This scene of a Christian student leading a class in protest against a supposedly anti-Christian educator isn’t an isolated event. A week earlier, a professor at the University of Central Florida sent an open letter to his class after a student allegedly stood up in class and called on his fellow students to refuse to participate in a discussion of “religious bigotry.”

The cultural “script” for both of these incidents appears to be Harold Cronk’s recent film “God’s Not Dead,” in which Radisson (Kevin Sorbo), a philosophy professor, requires his freshman students to sign a pledge avowing that, “God is dead.” One Christian student (played by Shane Harper) resists, rhetorically humiliating Radisson in front of his class, and inspires non-Christian classmates to convert. The film, an over-the-top piece of anti-intellectualism, portrays educators as modern-day Pharisees who promote ideology rather than critical thinking.

So it’s hardly surprising that some Christian students began performing this script in the first week of classes. By equating educators with the villains of the New Testament, ordinary classroom encounters can be transformed into an extension of Biblical narratives. In Cronk’s film, Harper’s character is compared to a Christian facing martyrdom in the Coliseum. Why would anyone want to be an ordinary student when they could be a hero of Biblical proportions? The “God’s Not Dead” script also harnesses ordinary adolescent resistance to authority and gives it cosmic significance. Swenson said of school authorities, “I want them to realize that God is in control and they’re not.”

Jason Bivins notes that for the New Christian Right, schools are a site not just of political but cosmic struggle against the forces of evil. This is a worldview in which ordinary policies can be seen as demonic persecution. Just as claims of a “War on Christmas” equated saying “Happy Holidays” with anti-Christian hostility, policies about saying “bless you” at inappropriate times may soon become the next battlefield of the culture wars.

Three things to note in all of this:

1. Kendra Turner is being representative by Jeremy Dys of Liberty Counsel fame.
2. In the various news reports there are no on camera interviews with any school officials.  
3. FERP, the why behind the schools silence.