An eight-year-old Colorado boy was punished last week for drawing a picture of a gun for a class assignment.
Widefield student Kody Smith was asked to look at the clouds and use his imagination to draw what he saw. After making the drawing, Kody was called into the office, and a behavior report was filed.
The boy insists he was just following his teacher's directions.
"Draw a picture of what you see in the clouds from your imagination and that picture is a gun," he told KKTV.
The Talbott Elementary behavior report said that Kody's picture was disruptive to the learning process. The second-grader's mother said the write-up is ludicrous.
"He's 8 years old," Angel Rivers said. "He was doing exactly what he was told to do for the assignment."
The boy's father was upset that the reprimand scared his son.
"It hurts. It hurts that he was so scared for being penalized for his imagination," Jeff Smith told KKTV.
The parents were also concerned that the behavior report would be in Kody's permanent record.
Widefield School District officials upheld the teacher's decision, and said the incident will not be permanently stored.
"Our primary responsibility as a school district is to ensure safety of all staff, students and community," they wrote in a statement.
"We exercised an age-appropriate reaction to an incident. The student's education was never disrupted nor is this incident on the student's permanent record.
'Our response was in line with routine procedures focused on school safety."
In 2012, a Canadian father was arrested and strip-searched after his four-year-old drew a picture of a man holding a gun. After finding no guns on his person or in his home, Waterloo Regional police apologized, but Forest Hill Public School officials stood by their decision to call police and children's services.
Family and Children's Services Executive Director Alison Scott also supported the school's decision.
"From a public safety point of view, any child drawing a picture of guns and saying there's guns in a home would warrant some further conversation with the parents and child," she told the Hamilton Spectator.
