Ray-Pec noose attracts ACLU

Last month, a student at Raymore-Peculiar High School gave a noose to a 14-year-old black student. A couple of students received three-day, in-house suspensions and Ray-Pec Superintendent Jeff Kyle blew off the incident, telling KCTV 5, “Yes, I guess you can call it a noose. I have visions of the long, large rope that they would hang them in the old west with. To me, that’s a noose, but this was a smaller piece of string that you would have a hard time hurting anybody with.”

Kyle’s comment didn’t go over well with the student’s parents, Donald and Sarah Washington, and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose legal branch fired off a letter (read the full text after the jump) to Kyle last week accusing the administrator of minimizing the episode and not understanding “the profound symbolic significance of the noose, especially when it is directed to an African-American student by white students.”