Parents of a 10-year-old boy are suing an elite California private elementary school for expelling the fifth grader after he sent a classmate emails containing squirt gun emoji and lyrics from the YNW Melly rap song “Murder on My Mind.”
The suit is against Curtis School in Los Angeles, which reportedly costs more than $28,000 per year and was once attended by David and Victoria Beckham’s kids. According to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, the boy and his friend had exchanged emails on Sept. 5, with each of them sending sequential lyrics to Melly’s “Murder on My Mind.”
The exchange, which was initiated by the boy’s friend, went as follows:
Twenty days later, on Sept. 25, the boy was sitting in math class when his friend sent him an email from across the room.
The boy responded “I hate you” in one email followed by several squirt gun emoji in subsequent messages, the suit shows.
“You dead yet,” the boy quipped.
After the squirt gun emoji emails, the boys interacted with each other as usual, including during the school’s annual fair at the Santa Monica Pier, the lawsuit said. On Sept. 30, the school’s director of third, fourth, and fifth grades reportedly took the boy out of class to inquire about the “inappropriate” emails. The director told the boy that she expected to take his technology privileges away as a form of punishment, the suit said. But the next day the head of the school, Meera Ratnesar, who also is named in the lawsuit, called the boy’s parents into a meeting and informed them the school was expelling him.
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“The emails between the two friends do not appear to violate any student conduct rule and the squirt gun emoji is available on the Curtis School’s IT system that is used by the students,” attorneys Mark M, Hathaway and Jenna E. Parker of Hathaway Parker Law Firm wrote. “On information and belief, Respondent Ratnesar did not impose any similar discipline on Petitioner’s friend, nor was his friend barred from campus nor expelled. Respondents’ final decision to expel Petitioner and bar him from campus is arbitrary and capricious.”
One of the parents fired off an email, which is included in the lawsuit, to Ratnesar on Oct. 2 that called the punishment “unreasonable,” especially considering the words the boys used were song lyrics. The boy had good grades and had never been in trouble before, his parents noted. Also worth pointing out, the parents said, is the school did not expel the other boy who used the lyrics as well.
“We are deeply disappointed by your decision to base expulsion on emails between two classmates who both showed a willingness to talk about guns based on a song’s lyrics. We think your decision fails to account for the context in which these communications occurred. Our son has never been accused of threatening others at the school,” the email read.
Ratnesar wrote back that she considered the squirt gun emoji “threatening” and the fact it was 20 days after sending the Melly lyrics was “a serious infraction we cannot ignore.” The administrator held fast on the decision to expel and said she would help the parents find a new school for the boy.
The school sent out the following statement to local media outlets:
“While we were disappointed to learn about the litigation, our priority is to ensure a safe and secure campus for all of our students,” the statement said. “We are unable to comment on individual students.”
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