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From Yahoo: A British headmaster is defending his controversial decision to ban students from touching snow on school grounds, the Telegraph reports.
“The rules are don’t touch the snow,” Ges Smith of the Jo Richardson Community School in Dagenham, England, explained during an appearance on the Good Morning Britain talk show. “If you don’t touch the snow, you’re not going to throw [a snowball].”
Smith claimed that the ban protected the school from potential lawsuits, citing a “duty of care issue.”
“It only takes one student, one piece of grit, one stone in a snowball in an eye, with an injury and we change our view,” he insisted as hosts Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan accused him of being overprotective.
Smith added that playing in the snow — which has blanketed much of the U.K. in a winter storm dubbed “The Beast From the East” — made children wet and “unfit for school.”
Viewers have blasted the ban as an extreme effort to spoil children’s fun, with one commenter calling Smith a “snowflake.”
Read the original Telegraph story here.
DCG