11-Year-Old Girl Suspended For 'Dangerous' Cartwheels At School

11-Year-Old Girl Suspended For 'Dangerous' Cartwheels At School

POSTED: 7:49 am EST November 12, 2004
UPDATED: 1:06 pm EST November 12, 2004
An 11-year-old girl in West Covina, Calif., was suspended from her school from doing "dangerous" cartwheels and hand stands during lunch time, according to a Local 6 News report.

Deirdre Faegre, who is a Student of the Month at San Jose-Edison Academy in West Covina was dismissed from the school this week after school authorities warned her for the last time to stop doing gymnastic stunts during lunchtime.

Administrators at the school said they were concerned about safety of their students.

They said gymnastics on the playground creates an unsafe situation.


http://www.local6.com/news/3913357/detail.html

....but I be the freepers will say this is liberals being PC and/or because of trial lawyers........

dems arent perfect. there is a reason so many have turned on them. shit like this is a perfect example

talking calif too

i wonder, are they allowed to run on the playground, play on monkey bar. damgerous world we live in

playground! MKJ

And people wonder why kids are getting fatter and fatter every year.
Cartwheels are a start....that need to be followed up by some laps. For every kid who is able to participate.

zombie kids that never play, act up or make noise...no talking in the lunchroom...ritalin...prozac...4 hours of homework every night...soccer on tuesday thursday saturday...piano on monday and wednesday...church on sunday and wednesday night...don't play in the front yard cause the boogeyman might nab you...no trick-or-treating except at the mall...


GOD I"M GLAD I'M NOT A KID TODAY!!!

its more dangerous to sit down in a playground than doing gymnastics... got kicked in the mouth from a guy who stole my spot. He got up and kicked me in the mouth. Chased him down and put him in a hammer-lock.

Never, ever piss off an off-duty "Globetrotter".

...knows the problem.

The girl was apparently asked many times to stop. She was asked to stop because she was -- in the judgement of adults -- creating an unsafe situation. If the adults were correct, and this girl was creating an unsafe situation, I don't see what they did wrong. It's hard to tell from a newspaper account, but I wonder what the real story is.

Is it too hard to understand that some kids can practice gymnastics safely, without threatening others, while other kids may have to be restrained from doing so? I've had to stop unsafe behavior like this, too. It strikes me that some of the behavior I've stopped would make me look like a fascist should it make headlines: "Teacher prohibits child from throwing ball on playground"

According to this girl's parents we should never interfere with a child "using her legs and arms." Get me out of school if that's the case.

In my experience, these parents would be the first to press a lawsuit if another child, asked repeatedly to stop, continued with the behavior and hurt their child. I hope these parents find a more reasonable school - many times, in my experience, parents who enable their children in ignoring adult directions have a hard time finding a reasonable school.

at my kids elementary school, kids are not allowed to run at recess.

To *run*.

We have gone to far.

..but how did they get there? I can assure you that most of the teachers I know aren't mean-spirited. The rules come from above. The rules are reactions to lawsuits real and threatened.

By the way, the incident above happened at lunch. It's possible that only a few adults were supervising a whole bunch of kids.

I remember playing in the gym during the winter and playing outside when it wasn't too bad. We played softball, dodge ball, tag and all sorts of games. I am sure it helped settled us down for class.

fat! After all, have you noticed that someone fat is almost always a repuke? Here in GA, I don't think I saw a single person of normal size sporting Bushie apparel or bumper stickers. We can't have people be healthy. They'll turn-out being happier and more likely to be compassionate rather than a hateful repuke.

I'm a 6'0" and 260 lbs. male. That makes me "fat". I am a strong Democrat. My weight has nothing to do with my politics.

There is more to this than a girl doing a few cartwheels in the playground at recess. Was she doing them inside? Was she placing other kids at risk by performing too close to others? It appears that this concern by the school was discussed with her and she chose to disregard their rules.

I don't think expecting children to listen to school authorities is unreasonable.

BTW: My daughter sustained a significant back injury while doing unsupervised gymnastics during school recess. She's ok but will have to live with periodic back pain for the rest of her life. It was not the schools fault in anyway-but in retrospect I can see how forbidding these activities without supervision could be a good thing.

There is more to this than a girl doing a few cartwheels in the playground at recess.

She was asked to stop. Repeatedly.

Regardless of how good a gymnist the kid is, she was apparently testing the system to see how much she could get away with in disregarding these requests.

If I pick my nose in class, it may be harmless, but if I'm asked to stop, and I refuse, I'm not just picking my nose, but also challenging the teacher's authority.

"I fought the law /
and the law won."

who would occasionally just launch into this whole 'Olympic floor exercise' thing, somersaulting through the campus. It was pretty amazing to look at, but it looked pretty dangerous.

send in the cops with tasers

that'll learn 'em.

They are all about sticking up for their child's rights, but don't bother to teach the child about responsibility. Because of parents like this schools are paralized in an inability to enforce disclipline due to the fear of yet another law suit to protect some childs "rights". Apparently now there is a right to do cartwheels during school regardless of the danger to other people or yourself.
I'll bet if this child did a cartwheel and hit her head on a locker, he parents would be right there with a lawyer, looking for a big pay off.

"She wasn't just doing cartwheels on the playground, she was doing them in the hall."

The family was on TV this morning and when the principal made this statement they did not deny it. What is it they don't get about HER BEHAVIOR WAS DANGEROUS AND SHE HAD BEEN ASKED REPEATEDLY TO STOP?

They would have paddled her and sent her back to class.

autuomatic doors, but "She knows what she's doing" She was put in detention severals times for doing cartwheels & flips in the halls between classes. Inbreeding.

didin't seem to ruin me or my contemporaries.

In our attempt to find the proper balance on discipline, we have allowed the pendulum to swing a bit too far, IMO. That's an observation. I don't have the answers.

I do know these things. Most kids want boundaries whether they realize it or not. All kids need them. Many kids would prefer to be anywhere else than in the clasroom. Since we've taken so many discipline tools away from teachers and stafftheywe are left with mostly detention and suspension for correctional tools. Suspension puts the kid outside the classroom. The kids' thinking on this is simple - if we act up/out enough, we get rewarded by getting what we want in the first place, which is out of school.

It doesn't take a genius to see the problem. It may take several geniuses to fixt it properly. I do think that a fine first step would be for parents to get off of the "My child can do no wrong" bandwagon and start teaching and enforcing personal responsibility at home.

Fifth grade and she plays football with the boys.
I think she woulkd be safer doing her gymnastics.

A bunch of fat lazy dimwits to vote for Bush? What would Ahnold say (seeing how he's been a proponent of athleticism in kids)?

That's how she was discovered in Romania...doing cartwheels at her school!

edited to add pic:

I totally understand, the school would be liable if *anything* were to happen. We need to protect our children as they are our only hope for the future!!

I swear if I hear/read that phrase one more time my head is going to explode.

I've been doing cartwheels since I was old enough to stand on my head, and that was at the age of five. Now at 51, I still stand on my head every chance I get, and was doing cartwheels in the courtyard as recently as the other day. I realize it may be too late in life to get over, but is there somewhere a cure for this dangerous exercise? What becomes of old hip-hop dancers?

Some of this crap was starting when I was in high school. It didn't affect me much, but I remember vividly the day Nerf footballs were "outlawed" on campus. "Someone's gonna get hurt," or so we were told.

A NERF football.

Ya know what. Kids sometimes get hurt by being active and adventurous, etc. It's part of life. We either need to deal with it or just quit screwing around and put our kids in hermetically sealed bubbles until they're eighteen ... then unleash them on the world where they'll someday get a scratch or something, after which every manner of germ will instantly invade their body and kill them since their immune systems are so undeveloped.

This story is absurd. Why hasn't thsi child been put on Prozac yet??? If she was drugged properly she wouldn't be trying to perform these outrageous cartwheels and whatnot.

I did a search for "gymnastics injury rates" and came up with http://www.lpch.org/DiseaseHealthInfo/HealthLibrary/orthopaedics/stats.html...25,500 children taken to emergency rooms every year for gymnastics injuries. It also says gymnastics is one of the highest injury-producing girls' sports, and that one of the more popular gymnastics injuries is to the brain.

Last I checked, in the United States we require that children who participate in gymnastics programs not do any activities without a coach present. Liability is why--if little Deirdre would have fallen and injured her precious brain, Deirdre's mom and dad would have been on the phone calling contingency lawyers--"we'll get that school district for a hundred million, how dare they let my precious daughter perform gymnastics with no coach around?"

Besides, they told the kid to stop doing that, and she refused.

I support the school--for that reason alone.

Since I participated in gymnastics, I know that the safest way to do it is out in the open on a mat. Not in a crowded situation like lunchtime. Not only was she putting herself in danger, but she was endangering other kids. No one would be defending her if she were throwing hard, heavy objects around the room without regarding anyone else's safety. But, she was doing something very similar by doing cartwheels during lunch, unless it's an unusual school, and everyone eats their lunch with 20 feet of space around each individual. She really could kick someone's eye out, easily, and blind them for life. Schools can go overboard with their rules, but a lack of rules is also dangerous.

Everyone keeps bringing up football, but as far as I know, football, when played on school grounds, is almost always a supervised event with adults overseeing it, out on the field separated from non-football participating students. We never had impromptu football games inside the cafeteria during lunch. I can't imagine that is too awfully common.

The cartwheels and kids jumping and playing outside are really noticeable. The wife and I were talking about that and she said she used to do them all the time. I'm not saying this girl was doing them safely or not, but they must come with some primitive instincts. Most kids nowdays don't do cartwheels and usually are given Ritalin at the first sign of activity. Just sit them down in front of the Tv or the computer.
Freedom for Cartwheels! :9

I sit in my front yard playing all day with my 2.5 yr old girl who begs to go outside. I hardly ever see other kids playing in their yards. They just sit inside all day or go to school.
It's all related to kid's being ablt to compete in the Global Market which means they need to learn how to sit mindlessly in a cubicle all day tapping at a keyboard. No room for cartwheels in this environment.

Cartwheelers for truth.:D

The things I did on the playground, it's a wonder I didn't kill myself - but they never tried to stop me. I feel sorry for kids now.

We got away with a lot of stuff on the playground the teachers didn't see. Some of it was indeed dangerous. As far as I can tell, none of us were killed, maimed or psychologically harmed. Recess was my favorite time in elementary school, mainly because we were allowed to run, play, yell and blow off steam. Kids need to have that outlet. Nowadays, I would have been on ritalin. I know I was a hyper kid back then. I took an adult version of an ADD characterstics test and scored positive for 18 out of 20 characteristics on the test. I work a full time job and have a family, a desk job no less. It just goes to show you that we underestimate what our kids are capable of. They are far more versatile than we realize.

In fairness to those who say the schools are suppressing them, I must say that they will get over it. I may favor the school environment I grew up with, however, the kids will adapt. They will find other outlets. Lets just hope we can steer them to outlets that are healthy for them.