Opinion: School Overreacted to Ahmed’s Clock But Needed to be Cautious

In Irving, Texas, a ninth-grade student named Ahmed Muhammad recently brought a clock he built to school, intending to impress his engineering teacher with his invention. Instead, Ahmed’s school and police felt that the clock resembled a bomb enough to be considered a threat. Police spokesman James McLellan said: “It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car.” From the reaction on all media platforms, the majority of the public condemned the school’s actions and came out in support of the aspiring inventor.

In our opinion, however, the media blew the whole story out of proportion. The school staff overreacted, as they do to most potentially dangerous situations, but in this case, they were right to be cautious.  Ralph Kubiak, Ahmed’s seventh grade history teacher, told The Dallas Morning News:  “He’s a weird little kid. I saw a lot of him in me. That thirst for knowledge … he’s one of those kids that could either be CEO of a company or head of a gang.”

Because Ahmed is a Muslim, the public and the media instantly jumped on the story. As history shows us, though, overly cautious actions by schools sometimes leads to lives saved.

We think this is worth the price of occasionally unreasonable discipline and suspensions of students, as in the case of Ahmed. A Google search reveals the following: In 2014, a white male student was suspended for threatening students in line with his hand as a laser gun.  In September of 2014, a girl was suspended for the whole year for writing about pot in a journal  and in July of 2014, a young boy chewed a pop-tart into the shape of a gun and made shooting movements at other students and was suspended. To us, these examples show that schools can overreact with students from all backgrounds all the time. In the case of Ahmed, we think the school definitely overreacted but was justified in being overly cautious.