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The parents of a 5-year-old California boy were not pleased that their son’s school suspended him for a day after he refused to take off his backpack and claimed a bomb was inside it; they said, “He’s 5. He has an imagination.”
A kindergarten teacher at Great Valley Charter School reportedly asked the boy, Jackson Riley, to remove his back pack from his person last month. However, Riley allegedly denied the order, saying a bomb inside the bag would explode if he took it off.
“So, they look in his backpack, and my son’s 5 years old; obviously there’s no bomb in my kid’s backpack,” Riley’s father said. “They called me at work and said, ‘There’s been an incident at the school.’ They told me everything that my son said, and they said, ‘You need to come pick your son up, and this is going to be a one-day suspension.'”
The school also sent a letter to Riley’s parents explaining he had been suspended because he “intentionally engaged in harassment, threats or intimidation.” However, the letter indicated the code the boy had violated only applied to fourth through 12th graders. So the school sent a new letter to reflect a different code, which accused Riley of making “terroristic threats towards school officials.”