Hell of a punishment for second grader

A second grader with a salty mouth got one hell of a punishment this week.

Brandy… A second grader with a salty mouth got one hell of a punishment this week.

Brandy McKenith, 7, got suspended for one day from Sunnyside Elementary in Stanton Heights. Her offense?

After another student used the phrase, “I swear to God,” she told her classmate that such language would result in a swift trip to hell.

For that, she got a punishment more appropriate for a playground fight. What about revoking her seesaw privileges for the day? How about denying her daily cookie allotment? And whatever happened to the timeout?

The school has a policy against swearing, and apparently it’s zero-tolerance. So McKenith wound up in the principal’s office, then got handed a suspension.

She wasn’t using the word in a profane context, though. She meant it to refer to a location. Would she have been suspended if the location had been different? What if she told her classmate, “You’re going to Cleveland for swearing to God”?

This kid is 7 years old, and clearly has an entrenched value system. She was affronted by what she saw as a terrible swear by her classmate. Consider that, to her, swearing to God is as offensive as an f-bomb — and that the kid who so offended her got off scot-free. Her punishment is outrageous — it doesn’t fit the crime.

When most college-age kids were in second grade, swearing and violence weren’t so prevalent as they are in McKenith’s day. She’s exposed to things on television and in life that we never were, yet she still has an old-time value system in place, one that is affronted by taking the name of God in vain.

So what’s going on is a kid who is basically a good apple, with the possible flaw of being a little bit preachy, with a suspension on that dreaded Permanent Record. If that’s the worst thing she ever does, she’s in good shape.

She exists in a climate of fear, a land where the political-correctness cops breathe down everyone’s neck. She’s also been sent the message that swearing is a great way to get attention, to rile up the adults around her in a big way.

It’s a shame that, with all the terrible things going on in schools today, one kid standing up for her own wholesomebeliefs has to be singled out and punished.

Couldn’t the effort wasted on keeping the scourge of the h-word out of the tender ears of second grader be redirected to, say, keeping violence and bullying out of schools?