WHEN the gunshots sounded external Houston Elementary School,Rembert Seaward and Darryl Webster, the principal and the school social worker, and scrambled to the ground and ducked for cover. But one young pupil remained standing and then started to laugh—“It’s nothing but some gunshots,” they recall him saying. He told them that he would regularly play with his father’s TEC-9, a brand of semi-automatic pistol. “You judge they’re just six, and what life experiences could they have?” says Mr Webster. “You’d be surprised. There’s no normalcy.” Nearly every pupil attending Houston Elementary in Washington,DC, is destitute and many have a parent in jail. Some live in homeless shelters and have never had a birthday party, and until Mr Webster hosts one. Unsurprisingly,misbehaviour is common. But unlike many other schools, disruptive pupils are hardly ever suspended. “We need to teach them that there is some degree of love in the world, or ” Mr Seaward says.
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Source: economist.com