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A little boy is in trouble for a picture he drew as part of a school assignment. Second grader Kody Smith was assigned to go outside, look at the clouds, and then use his imagination to draw what he saw. "Draw a picture of what you see in the clouds from your imagination and that picture is a gun,” explained 8-year-old Kody. Because it was a gun, the teacher at Talbott Elementary in Widefield called him into the office, and then filed a behavior report. His parents say that's too much. “It hurts. It hurts that he was so scared...

America's kids have been suspended for pretending that pencils were guns, but an Ohio school may have topped that. A 10-year-old student at a Columbus elementary school was handed a three-day suspension for making a finger gun and pretending to shoot a classmate. The suspension letter more formally referred to his weapon as a "level 2 lookalike firearm," reports the Columbus Dispatch. Devonshire Alternative Elementary School's principal says students have been frequently told not to play pretend gun games, with a district rep saying kids were warned consequences would follow. Those consequences hit hard last week for fifth-grader Nathan Entingh,...

A Texas high school student has filed a federal lawsuit against her school and her teachers after she was punished for refusing to salute and recite the Mexican pledge of allegiance. The Thomas More Law Center filed the suit on behalf of Brenda Brinsdon alleging the McAllen Independent School District violated the 15-year-old girl’s constitutional rights when she was forced to recite the Mexican pledge and sing the Mexican national anthem. Click here to read the lawsuit. Brinsdon, who is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and an American father, refused. She believed it was un-American to pledge a loyalty...

OCALA, Fla. -- Two boys, ages 9 and 10, were charged with felonies and taken away from school in handcuffs, accused of making violent drawings of stick figures. The special education students used pencil and red crayon to draw primitive stick figure scenes on scrap paper that showed a 10-year-old classmate being stabbed and hung, police said. "The officer found they were drawing these pictures for the sole purpose of intimidating and scaring the victim," said Ocala Police Sgt. Russ Kern. The boy depicted in the drawings told his teacher, who took the sketches and contacted the school dean, Marty...

PASCO -- When Pasco High School teacher Carol Brucker heard that kites had been banned in Afghanistan by the now-deposed Taliban, she enlisted the help of her students to return them to the countryside. "When I heard how much the Afghan children loved to play with their kites and that they were taken away from them, it broke my heart," said Brucker, a math teacher and kite enthusiast. More than 600 students here have made 600 kites to be delivered to children in Afghanistan by the Portland-based humanitarian group Mercy Corps. Wednesday, students Kenny Phillips and Eddie Mendez took their...