My sons both go to high school in the Slippery Rock School District. My oldest son (Senior) was on the Honor Roll, goes to Vo-Tech, and has a job. My youngest son (Freshman) has high aspirations of being in the U.S. Army, Faithfully watches the Military Channel, and collects military memorabilia. Myself, I was a K-9 Explosives and Narcotics Handler for the last ten years for all of the school districts in the Intermediate Unit 4. I am still a K-9 Handler but the company that I work for no longer holds the IU4 contract. I have done my best to keep my kids educated, polite and courteous to others. They have been exposed to camping, fishing and hunting all their lives. They have been taught to live off the land and how to survive in the wild if the need would ever arise and even how to reload their own ammunition. I guess this is the point that the school can step in a make me out to be a bad parent. The following paragraph will explain a lot.

My son was sent to the Asst. Principals office for a doodle that he drew in his "Agenda" (Notebook). This drawing consisted of stick figures in a "bunker" pointing sticks at other stick figures and at an approaching aircraft. At the bottom right of the drawing were the words, "Turn the page to see what happens". When you turn the page it showed the aircraft had dropped a bomb on the bunker and a cloud of smoke rising into the air with the word "BOOM". My son holds high aspirations of becoming a Sniper for the military. He collects military memorabilia and the first thing that he does when he gets in the door from school is turn on the Military Channel. He was told that two of his friends were also being suspended because they had pictures of swords drawn on their books. His two friends were never questioned and never suspended. He was suspended for three days for this drawing and forced to see the school psychologist.

My son finally had a meeting with the school psychologist and he in turn phoned me and explained that in his opinion my son was NOT a threat to the school or anyone else. In my view this should have been finished at that point. Last week I was phoned by this Community Response person to set up a meeting and interview my wife and myself. At that meeting this morning, I left the woman go into her routine about why we were there…..Basically this was a meeting for her to feel out what kind of parents we were and to get us to sign more releases. The whole point of this is my son was NOT deemed a threat to himself, the school or anyone else for that matter and the matter should have been ended. Being that he has been deemed "NOT A THREAT" and being that he had already been suspended for the picture, were his First Amendment Rights not violated? My attorney seems to think so. I implore all of you parents that have children in this school district to MONITOR what is going on in our schools! Where are we at in this great nation when it is illegal to draw a picture?…..Isn't that what they used to teach us in ART CLASS? Censorship of media that is directed towards an individual, race, social class, facility or institution is appropriate. Censorship of a picture with no affiliation to any of the above is nothing more than a direct violation of our First Amendment!