A father is urging an Illinois school district to reassess its dress code after his son was told he could either remove his U.S. Marines T-shirt or be suspended.
Daniel McIntyre, 44, of Genoa, told
FoxNews.com that his son's teacher asked the 14-year-old on Monday to either turn his Marines T-shirt inside out or risk possible suspension. Karen Deverell, Michael McIntyre's eighth grade teacher, claimed the two interlocking guns on the shirt violated the school's dress code.
"My son is very proud of the Marines, and, in fact, of all the services," Daniel McIntyre told FoxNews.com. "So he wears it with pride. There are two rifles crossed underneath the word 'Marines' on the shirt, but to me that should be overlooked. It's more about the Marines instead of the rifles."
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The boy complied with his teacher's request to turn the shirt inside out, even though his father said he had worn the garment to school many times before without issue.
The school's dress code outlaws any clothing that features inappropriate images or gang symbols, but does not explicitly ban pictures of guns or other weapons.
Indeed, Joe Burgess, the Genoa-Kingston school district superintendent, said the shirt is not considered a violation of the school's dress code and had the incident been reported to administrators, Michael McIntyre would have been allowed to continue wear it.
"Nobody took the next step of asking the principal or making them aware of it," Burgess told FoxNews.com. "The teacher is obviously allowed to question anything they feel might be a violation of dress code, but again, had an administrator been allowed to respond, this could have been taken care of yesterday."
No word on why Deverell never reported the incident or made a big deal about it in the first place, but Daniel McIntyre suspects it was an overreaction in the wake of
the Newtown, Conn., school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December.
This isn’t the first time teachers may have have overreacted.
In January, a 6-year-old boy was suspended from his Maryland elementary school for pointing his finger like a gun at a classmate and saying "pow."
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Two weeks later,
two 6-year-old boys were suspended for pointing their fingers like imaginary guns during a game of cops and robbers at a different Maryland elementary school.
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