The San Francisco elementary school that suspended a fourth-grader for saying "Merry Christmas" to an atheist teacher didn't really suspend anyone.
It was a hoax.
The story of the elementary kid's suspension was originally published nearly six days ago on Nationalreport.net, a website with mock stories made to look real. In the story, 9-year-old Timothy Dawson, a student at Argon Elementary, said "Merry Christmas" to his homeroom teacher. The teacher, a known Atheist, was offended by Dawson's remark and got him suspended for a week.
The National Report site first said the name of the school was "Argon Elementary," but later changed it to "Anon," SFGate, a San Francisco news site, reported. Both schools are also fake. But Argonne Elementary, a real school, received a slew of threatening emails and 75 phone calls from people outraged by the story. The school had to beef up security and increase patrols around the campus due to warnings of retaliation, SFGate reported. Principle Cami Okubo exposed the hoax on the school's website.
"The incident did not occur at our school, Argonne school, or any school in the San Francisco Unified School District," the principle wrote.
The school told USA Today that neither Dawson nor the teacher involved are real.
"It is sad that people make up such stories and agitate others into outrage in such a way," Reverend Craig Donofrio told The San Francisco Chronicle.
Donofrio, host of the radio show "Messenger of Good News," sent Okubo an email when he read the National Report's story.
"Thank you for your monumental blunder, it will provide me with weeks of material on my show," Donofrio wrote.
For Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, the backlash that Argonne Elementary had to deal with shows how people tend to believe anything that reaffirms their predispositions.
"What that means in practice is people seize onto these online nuggets that confirm what they believe," Nyhan told SFGate. "No one thinks they're misinformed."
