A Restraining Order Against A 5-Year-Old? You’re About To Find Out Why
Brian Metzger, a dad whose six-year-old daughter goes to kindergarten in Kenosha, Wisconsin, recently went to court to take out a restraining order — against a five-year-old boy. Needless to say, the reaction he received, largely via social media, was not exactly supportive. Many other parents wanted to know why he didn’t simply speak to the boy’s parents.
But Metzger says those people don’t know all the facts. The Prairie Lane Elementary School, he says, has been in touch with the five-year-old’s parents but that hasn’t stopped the attacks on his daughter.
“The boy, he says, has thrown rocks and sand at his little girl, kicked her in the face and taunted her mercilessly. But it was when his daughter came home and told him that her five-year old schoolmate said to her, ‘I want to slit your throat and watch you bleed,’ that he decided to take legal action.”
Metzger says the boy has had made similar threats against other children.
“Now that I’ve done all this, they finally took him out of the classroom my daughter is in, but it’s not enough,” said Brian Metzger. He says that his daughter loved kindergarten at first, but since the boy’s bullying began, she no longer wants to go to school at all.
The dad believes that a five-year-old who would make such a serious and violent threat might actually act on it. Or at least, he doesn’t want to take that chance. He wants the five-year-old kicked out of school completely.
A hearing on the restraining order is set for May 20. Metzger says seeking legal protection against the bully was a last resort only after the school, and the boy’s parents, did nothing.
But school spokesperson Tanya Ruder simply says, “There’s always two sides to every story.”
Though she declined to get into the specifics of the case, she said that incidents of student misbehavior are taken on a case-by-case basis.
“There’s not a set threshold of what causes or what would determine when a child is moved out of a classroom,” she said.
But Brian Metzger is not satisfied. He says that regardless of how the hearing in the restraining order goes, he will continue his effort to get the five-year-old terror expelled from school.
“What they’re doing, their policies,” Metzger says, “aren’t good enough.”