Pop-Tart Gun School Suspension Case Settled After 3 Years

ANNAPOLIS, MD — An undisclosed settlement has been reached after more than three years in the legal battle over the suspension of an Anne Arundel County student who reportedly nibbled a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun that he “fired” at classmates, according to reports.

In June 2016 a judge ruled school officials were within their rights to suspend the student, who was 7 years old at the time. But Josh Welch’s parents continued to press to have a suspension removed from their son’s record after he chewed his breakfast into a shape resembling a gun on March 1, 2013.

First the Anne Arundel County Board of Education and later the Maryland State Board of Education sided with school administrators at Park Elementary in Baltimore who suspended Josh for classroom disruption. He is now in the sixth grade.

Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Ronald A. Silkworth ruled this summer that school leaders could reasonably consider the boy’s actions disruptive and that “a suspension was appropriately used as a corrective tool to address this disruption, based on the student’s past history of escalating behavioral issues,” The Washington Post reports.

Neither side would discuss the terms of the agreement, which was reached with the help of a judge-mediator and signed last week, Robin Ficker, the family’s attorney, told The Washington Post. He said he could not comment under the terms of the settlement. The Welch family and school officials also declined to comment to the Post.

Assistant principal Myrna Phillips said in 2013 that Josh had “used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class.” Josh, 7 at the time and in second grade, had crafted his Pop-Tart into what the teacher interpreted as a gun. He was suspended for two days.

But Josh and his father, B.J. Welch, said he was making a mountain out of his Pop-Tart and not a gun.

After coverage of an April 2014 hearing for the boy, he became a national symbol for gun rights advocates. Josh’s family sought to clear his school record over the Pop-Tart gun incident, and politicians scrambled to his cause, with one giving him a lifetime membership to the NRA.

According to the Post, hearing officer Andrew W. Nussbaum wrote in 2014: “As much as the parents want this case to be about a ‘gun,’ it is, rather, a case about classroom disruption from a student who has had a long history of disruptive behavior and for whom the school had attempted a list of other strategies and interventions before resorting to a suspension.”

Nussbaum said he was convinced that “had the student chewed his cereal bar into the shape of a cat and ran around the room, disrupting the classroom and making ‘meow’ cat sounds, the result would have been exactly the same.”

But Josh’s father said at the time he had not heard anything about his son disrupting the class prior to the Pop-Tart gun incident.

“I don’t think he was suspended because he was being rowdy. I think he was suspended because of the sensitive nature of the topic,” Welch said in 2014.

The incident happened about three months after 20 Sandy Hook School students were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut and schools nationwide had tightened security measures.