6-Year-Old Shouldn’t Be Targeted as Public Enemy No. 1

You’ve read a lot about what a holy terror Jimmy Peters is. Maybe you even saw the news coverage of parents picketing his return to school this week.

Jimmy is 6.

That’s right, they picketed a 6-year-old. Or, as one of Jimmy’s classmates said to his mom when he saw the TV coverage, “Is Jimmy going to jail? Has Jimmy been bad?”

Oh, the parents would say they’re not picketing Jimmy; no, they’re protesting the federal judge’s ruling that reinstated Jimmy after the Ocean View School District in Huntington Beach wouldn’t allow him in a regular classroom.

I wonder if that distinction wasn’t lost on Jimmy as he made his way through the picket line to kindergarten.

And the parents contend Jimmy is disrupting education?

School officials have said that Jimmy, who has a language disability, is prone to violence and disruptive outbursts that endanger his classmates and make him unfit for a regular classroom. He’s been suspended twice this spring, once for a day and once for five days.

Most of what we’ve seen and read so far has come from school officials and parents who describe Jimmy as a biting, yelling, spitting, kicking, tantrum-throwing menace. They depict a classroom where learning comes to a stop because Jimmy is there.

I must have missed the pickets against all those other kindergartners who pinch, bite and spit or hit.

Even so, not many of us could argue that we’d want our children in a class like that. One student shouldn’t be able to terrorize a class, notwithstanding that such scenarios have existed in classrooms since time immemorial.

But that assumes that Jimmy is all those things.

What you need to know is that not everyone concurs with that picture of him. And once you know that, it leads to all sorts of interesting things to ponder about why Jimmy has been targeted as Public Enemy No. 1.

Most of Jimmy’s defense so far has come from his father, who has characterized some of the district’s allegations against his son as lies. OK, you say, his father would be expected to defend his child.

Let me introduce you to some other people.

One is Patricia Donnelly, who has a child in Jimmy’s class. She asked her son if Jimmy ever hit anyone, and her son said no. She asked if Jimmy threw a table, as was alleged, and he said no. Her son said Jimmy “talks loud sometimes” but that other kids do bad stuff, too. She said that, “Neither I nor my husband believe that Jimmy is dangerous or constitutes a danger for our son.”

Another is Nicki Akstinas, whose son is also Jimmy’s classmate. She said her son never mentioned that Jimmy was a problem. Her son, she said, is not afraid of Jimmy and refers to Jimmy as his friend. Mrs. Akstinas said she has been in Jimmy’s class many times for brief periods and saw other children being more disruptive than she saw Jimmy being.

A third parent, Deborah Hoops, said her 9-year-old daughter has played with Jimmy for up to two hours at a time and that her 6-year-old son has gone to the beach with Jimmy and considers him a friend.

The remarks of Mmes. Donnelly, Akstinas and Hoops were delivered under oath and given to the judge who ruled in Jimmy’s favor. A fourth woman, Elaine Bauman, has been Jimmy’s baby-sitter for several months. She factors into this because one of the school employees, in her statement to the court, said Jimmy bit her, a teacher and Bauman.

Here is Bauman’s under-oath statement to the court: “I . . . adamantly deny that Jimmy either hit or bit me as reported.”

These testimonials may confuse more than enlighten.

They raise this question with me: Is this supposedly horribly disruptive 6-year-old invisible to some of his classmates?

Further, once it is established that not all parents are upset with Jimmy, isn’t there a huge burden of proof to justify segregating him?

In her successful defense of Jimmy’s right to return to his class, Tustin attorney Joan Honeycutt referred to school officials’ “untruthful, misleading and exaggerated statements . . . which have painted a picture of Jimmy as some type of dangerous, loathsome monster.”

Honeycutt told me late last week that school officials did a terrible job of preparing Jimmy’s teachers and support staff with the challenges he presented them. Then, when parents joined the fray, Honeycutt said, school officials “sacrificed Jimmy, threw him to the wolves.”

We could argue this all day.

No, I’m not arguing that every child automatically belongs in a mainstream class. Some are simply too unruly or emotionally disturbed.

But before segregating a 6-year-old kindergartner with a disability, especially one whose allegedly violent acts toward other students seem no more egregious than those seen in school every day, I want overwhelming evidence.

In that regard, it was interesting to read the picket signs the parents held.

“What about my child’s education?”

“Our kids have rights.”

“Protect our kids.”

Jimmy’s dad couldn’t have said it any better.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.