Story Archive

Bureaucratic Delay

School officials in Big Lake, Minn., notified a group of students that their submitted yearbook photo, showing them holding firearms, could certainly not be included in the school yearbook. You know, because guns (and zero tolerance). The group: the school’s fully authorized trapshooting team. After an uproar, the school made an exception to policy, specifically allowing the trapshooting team to pose with their shotguns. The team’s coach, Rhonda Eckerdt, apparently sparked the fight on purpose, after turning in gunless photos in earlier years. “I certainly didn’t expect it to get blown up like it did,” she said, “but me ‘asking’ for the change the last five years wasn’t working.” School Superintendent Steve Westerberg decried the “intense conversation around this topic on social media and the phone calls and emails we received” about rejecting the photo, because that conversation “only delayed the process.” (RC/Minneapolis Star-Tribune) ...The “process” being the tradition of kicking the decision to next year.