“I don’t think a six-year-old without autism would understand that that’s not appropriate. They make their fingers into a gun. They pick up sticks and make them into guns.”
An autistic six-year-old boy was suspended from his Georgia elementary school after he bit his sandwich into the shape of a gun and pointed it at a classmate.
Josh Medina, a first grader at Sara Harp Minter Elementary School, was suspended in March over the incident. His mother has argued that the punishment is part of a broader pattern in which school officials fail to adequately account for her son’s disability when disciplining him. According to a report by Atlanta News First, Medina has been disciplined by the school at least 33 times, including 14 suspensions.
Medina has previously been suspended for pointing a water bottle at another student while making gun noises. He was also disciplined after drawing a picture of a pilgrim shooting a turkey.
“They informed me over that phone call that he was getting suspended for it,” his mother said regarding the most recent incident. “And you’re just like baffled.”
The family has hired a former special education director, Donna Reynolds, to represent them during meetings with Fayette County Schools. Reynolds argued that the district failed to properly consider both Medina’s age and autism.
“I don’t think a six-year-old without autism would understand that that’s not appropriate,” Reynolds said. “They make their fingers into a gun. They pick up sticks and make them into guns.”
“They need to look at the whole picture,” she added. “You need to look at his age. You need to look at his disability. You need to look at past behavior, and you need to determine whether this is more of a teaching moment or is this something that really needs discipline, and is that discipline then going to change the behavior?”
Fayette County Schools Superintendent Jonathan Patterson issued a statement to Atlanta News First, not addressing the sandwich incident directly but saying, “We just want to recognize that these things are difficult.”
“We have parents who are very happy with what’s going on and we have parents that aren’t. And so we try to work through those individually,” he said. “We’re committed to meeting parents to try to work through these challenging situations that maybe we agree on, that maybe we don’t agree on, but we’re committed to keep coming back to the table and trying to resolve those things.”
Medina’s mother, meanwhile, has said that the constant disciplinary actions have left him feeling like a “bad kid.”
“There were definitely times when he would come home and say ‘I’m a bad kid’ and that’s really hard to hear as a mom,” she said.
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