A controversy surrounding a deaf preschooler in Nebraska that has gone viral on the Internet is giving the Grand Island School District in New York a giant headache.
Grand Island Public Schools in Nebraska a week ago asked the boy to change the sign he uses for his name because it resembles a gun and violates the district's weapons policy.
News of the decision sparked a national backlash, including a protest petition drive on change.org.
But some people haven't differentiated between the Grand Island in Nebraska and the one in New York, some 1,500 miles apart.
And as a result, angry emails and telephone calls - some threatening - have poured into the local district.
"What we learned was how quickly people can respond to stories in the media sometimes before they know all the facts," said Robert Christmann, superintendent of Grand Island (N.Y.) schools. "The sheer number of responses also surprised our staff. We stopped counting the emails and phone calls."
"What was striking to us was the almost total lack of civility contained in the emails," he added. "They were best described as nasty. Copies of these emails were sent many times to each of our five principals and in some cases it appeared to our Board of Education. Most were not printable."
The Nebraska case involves 3-year-old Hunter Spanjer. His father, Brian, said the sign for his son's name is a symbol used through Signing Exact English, or SEE. The sign with the index and middle fingers crossed differs slightly from the American Sign Language symbol for gun.
Asking that the sign be modified is the equivalent of asking a person to change his or her name, some advocates for the deaf say.
"I've never seen anything like this," Timothy Kelly, superintendent of St. Mary's School for the Deaf in Buffalo, said of the Nebraska case.
St. Mary's works with about 47 school districts across Western New York.
Kelly said he agrees with a statement by Howard Rosenblum, CEO of the National Association of the Deaf.
"A name sign is the equivalent of a person's name, and to prohibit a name sign is to prohibit a person's name," Rosenblum stated.
In the wake of the protest, the Nebraska school system announced Wednesday that it is "not requiring any current student with a hearing impairment to change his or her sign language name."
It also said: "The sign language techniques taught in the school district are consistent with the standards of the Nebraska Department of Education and ASL (American Sign Language.)"
In the wake of the confusion over the two Grand Island districts, the local one has posted a disclaimer on its website.
"It wasn't until the emails began flooding in from all over the U.S. that we made an effort to find out the source of what caused the reaction," Christmann said. "What we learned was that the Grand Island, Nebraska, school district had taken what everybody thought was a foolish action toward this very young child. People hearing about it on the TV or seeing the print version ignored the Nebraska part and thought that it happened in Grand Island, N.Y."
He said the local staff tried to respond to each email, but it soon became obvious that it "would have taken too much time to deal with each one individually."
"In addition, my clerical staff and I had to endure a large number of personal phone calls in which the callers sometimes left messages but on most occasions wanted to talk to the person who made the decision ... The content of these phone calls was very similar to that of the emails. I was embarrassed for what my staff had to listen to ... We received threats that were very concerning to our staff," Christmann added.
"The level of anger was also a surprise ... We cannot report that any call or email reflected what would be considered as a mature response to an obviously troubling school district decision. The people in the Nebraska district should be grateful to us for having the same name. We cannot imagine what came to the other school district based on what came to us by mistake," Christmann said.
Jack Sheard, communications coordinator for Grand Island (Neb.) Public Schools, told The Buffalo News Thursday his staff also had met with unnecessary negative comments.
"It's unfortunate anyone in any school has to put up with such negativity directed towards them."