East Paulding Student Banned From Graduation

Paulding County School Board members voted to uphold a student’s long-term suspension—and then some.

Jacob Zimmerman, following , will now also be barred from extracurricular activities, including graduation, following the school board’s 6-1 vote to uphold the original punishment levied by school district staff and add the additional stipulations.

The decision followed a closed session that lasted nearly four hours.

Last month, Zimmerman told Fox 5 Atlanta that he has been suspended for the remainder of the school year for his role in the incident, though claims he was only involved in spray-painting the intersection in front of the school—an action he says many other students have done in past years.

saw school buildings spray-painted to include windows; some perpetrators also made it onto the school’s roof, which was also painted. Some of the paintings across the campus, in addition to “Senior” and “2012,” also included the text “YOLO” and “Musgrove is a [expletive]”—the latter message seemingly targeting Assistant Principal Greg Musgrove. In all, school district officials said clean-up of the damage to East Paulding High .

Though Zimmerman told the Atlanta TV station that he is spending his last remaining weeks of his senior year in alternative school, no official word on his peers’ punishments have been released by school district officials, who said that how many students were punished, what punishments they received or whether students’ punishments differed.

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