Victim’s mom upset student is back in class after assault

News stories of students getting kicked out of schools over zero-tolerance policies are not uncommon. A student mentions a gun, and action comes down. One Ohio boy was suspended for making a finger gun gesture at school, another was suspended for liking a photo of a firearm on Instagram.

But an Auburn family is finding out that the same is not true for knife-wielding students.

“It’s a nightmare for our entire family right now,” Kara Rowbury told the Dori Monson Show.

“There is no zero tolerance policy (for knives), only for guns,” she said. “Schools do not want to have to force a child, for disciplinary reasons, out of a school.”

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KIRO 7 reports that the incident involved a knife with a 4-inch blade and an angry student at Auburn’s Riverside High School last June.

“Our child had two classes with this individual,” Rowbury said. “Earlier in the day the child had made some disturbing comments about wanting to harm somebody and kill somebody. My child, unfortunately at that time, and another child didn’t take this to a teacher. They thought they were playing, and he was around his friends. My son just tried to distance himself from this student.”

“That boy said, ‘I want to harm anybody, I want to kill anyone,’” she said. “He was feeling very angry that day, I guess.”

Her son had a gym class for the last period of the day. That’s when Rowbury said the boy in question took a knife with him to the gym class where her son was throwing a football around.

“My child went to go catch a pass, he didn’t catch the pass” Rowbury said. “The other student saw this, that my child was at the opposite end of the field and took the opportunity to walk up to my child and said, ‘Come on, I want to provoke you, I want to make you angry.’”

“Then he proceeded to pull a knife out of his pocket, grabbed my son and lunged at my child, tried to stab my child,” she said. “My kid pushed him off of him and ran off the field. While this was going on, I don’t know where the teacher was. My son didn’t know where the teacher was.”

Her son ran to another gym class and told a teacher. Rowbury said she doesn’t know if there are any witnesses to the incident. She just knows that the boy was arrested and pleaded guilty to the incident. The student was suspended and ordered to serve community service with supervised probation, according to KIRO 7.

Rowbury obtained a court protection order against the knife-wielding student, but she soon found out that the law didn’t go as far as she thought.

“Fast forward and first day of school, my child goes to school, and sees this other child there and he felt very unsafe,” Rowbury said.

She said that the Auburn school did not inform her that the student who assaulted her son with a knife would be back in classes this year — her son’s senior year.

School officials tell KIRO 7 that the offending student has a right to attend classes, and that the two boys’ class schedules have been organized so they will not have contact with one another during the school day.

KIRO 7 also reports that school districts in Seattle, Bellevue and Issaquah would expel a student over a knife violation. A superintendent, however, can modify that expulsion.

Rowbury has spoken with school officials. She says that the principal and vice principal have been very nice to her family and are trying to find a solution.

“We do believe that my child, being the victim, should not have the burden of moving schools,” Rowbury said. “With my child being the one who feels unsafe, we feel that responsibility should fall on the superintendent to make the call, or the burden of the parent at this point to provide an education for the child, whether it be home school or another school.”