Angry Jensen Mom to Speak to Urbandale School Board Tonight

A parent, upset by Urbandale school administrators' discipline of a second-grader who brought a pellet gun to school last month, plans to speak to the school board about the situation tonight.

Kim Yoblonski, mother of a 9-year-old girl who said she saw the boy with the gun on the playground, has started a petition on Change.org, in an effort to get school administrators to take stronger action against the boy.

Parents said the boy was suspended for four days, although officials could have issued a longer suspension under the district's weapons policy.

Yoblonski said she's upset that the boy threatened to shoot the children who saw he had a pellet gun and who told teachers about it. (The pellet gun pictured above is not the actual gun.)

Pellet Gun Was Loaded

Although an email from school officials on the day of the incident said “immediately the student was confronted and turned over an unloaded pellet gun,” Urbandale Police spokesman Randy Peterson told the Des Moines Register that the gun was loaded.

Peterson said the loaded gun was found later by police off the school grounds. The boy's mother, Ashena Tucker, has pleaded guilty to interfering with the police investigation in the case and will pay a $500 fine. He declined to say how the gun went missing.

Yoblonski said the boy has harassed her daughter since returning to school.

She said she would like to see him expelled, but her petition, which names school Superintendent Doug Stilwell, members of the Urbandale school board and the Urbandale City Council, does not request a specific punishment.

Out-of-State Signatures

More than 100 people had signed the online petition as of Monday afternoon, although few of them were from Iowa or even Urbandale. 

Yoblonski said she doesn't know if any other parents will be with her tonight at the 7 p.m. school board meeting in the council chambers at

She said hasn't contacted the Jensen Parent Teacher Organization and although some other parents support her, no one has committed to appearing with her at the board meeting tonight.

Even so, Yoblonski, who works in the evenings, said this is important enough to her that she took an unpaid day off work.

Shy But Determined

"I'm very, very nervous about tonight," she said. "I'm actually a very shy person."

"At one point in time, I probably would have said, 'We've come up against a wall, we probably should let it go.' But I've gotten so many emails from parents who've said they've gone up against school officials on the same issue."

What would she like the school board to do?

"I would like for them to acknowledge that there's a problem," she said.

And if they don't?

"I'll probably focus on the mayor or (Urbandale state Senator) Brad Zaun," Yoblonski said.