SAYREVILLE, N.J. — Waiting for their children outside Wilson School Thursday afternoon, parents were buzzing — just like the news media and others — about the school's decision to suspend four kindergartners for pretending to shoot one another with their fingers.
Many of the parents said that the three-day suspensions might be too severe a penalty. But they also agreed that in these times, when a 6-year-old in Flint, Mich., recently shot and killed a classmate, the rules of play for all children have had to change.
"It's a different world we live in today," said Teresa Kominkiewicz, the mother of three children at Wilson, a red brick school that has 485 students in kindergarten through fourth grade. "Kids can't play the same games we used to. I applaud the school for what they did."
The parents were reacting to news reports Thursday that the four students had been suspended last month after an incident on the playground in which the four pretended their fingers were guns and said they wanted to shoot one another. Classmates who overheard them reported them to the principal, Georgia Baumann.
Thursday, Baumann referred all questions about the matter to an assistant superintendent, but The Associated Press quoted her as saying "that she had ordered the suspensions because the children's behavior was frightening to the other students."
"I don't know if that's an appropriate manner of play anymore," Baumann told The Associated Press. "Given the climate of our society, we cannot take any of these statements in a light manner."
The incident became public after the parents of one of the children called a local newspaper to complain about how the matter had been handled. But Dennis Fyffe, the assistant superintendent, said that none of the parents of the four children had told the administrators that they wanted to challenge the punishment for an incident that he said was appropriately handled.
"It was not as benign as a cops-and-robbers game," Fyffe said, although he refused to elaborate about what the students were doing, saying it would violate privacy rules. "The behavior caused other children to be very upset."
Fyffe said the district would rather err by overreacting than by ignoring such behavior, especially after the Michigan shooting in February.
"It really changed how educators think about the threat of violence," he said. "We will take the steps that are necessary to ensure the safety of our students and staff in all of our schools. If that means we get some criticism, we can live with that."
Fyffe said that district administrators would reassess suspension as a penalty for such behavior in the future, but he said they had no regrets about penalizing the four students in this incident, "given the circumstances."