Back in my day (which really wasn’t that long ago, at least High School), getting busted with actual weed was:
Can’t imagine it being worse for grade school kids, even today. Not where I grew up, anyways.
Ah, the favoured course of the hysterical authoritarian caught being in the wrong. Doubling down with a soucon of spin.
Man it goes back to one of the lines from a few good men. “You have my client for buying a dime bag of oregano, you can’t prosecute them for stupidity.” I know I got the quote wrong. But it fits apparently in schools you can prosecute students and hold them responsible for your own stupidity.
Virginia is for leafers.
Sure, that’s a possibility. I’m guessing he was just going around at lunch, showing people a maple leaf or something and saying “Look! I have pot!” as a joke, the wrong kid (or lunch monitor) overheard, and suddenly he’s in the principal’s office being given the riot act for ‘drugs, false or real’ or whatever their ridiculous zero-tolerance rule is.
My sister, a valedictorian, was expelled a month before HS graduation because she brought a transparent yellow plastic squirtgun to band rehearsal, and it violated the school’s zero-tolerance gun policy. The new rules are insane.
I feel sorry for kids today. When I was in 6th grade a kid brought a baggie filled with loose leaf tea and said it was pot. The teacher caught him, told him he was an idiot in front of the class and made him throw it in the trash. The kid was shamefaced and probably learned his lesson. He was fine the next day and went on to graduate with the rest of us.
The only possible explanation that makes any sense to me at all is that the school administration does not like the kid’s parents and they are taking it out on them by way of abusing their authority over the kid.
The judge should just render a judgement in the parents’ favor without a trial… he doesn’t need any evidence…
Is this kind of like getting added to the BoingBoing spreadsheet?
Is this kind of like getting added to the BoingBoing spreadsheet?
Not familiar with this. Google unfamiliar as well. What’s the story there?
In addition to the new rules being insane, something nobody has pointed out yet is that the town in question is basically Barney Fife’s Mayberry, with a population of under 7000 people.
That can’t help much.
Not a spreadsheet, but I think this is what’s referenced.
I’ve heard of this substance!
Did you know that all of the chemical elements in it are also in real alcohol?
It wouldn’t happen to be Dihydrogen Monoxide, would it? Because that stuff is dangerous!
Way back in early grade school, I got a fake syringe with a spring-loaded needle (thank you, Johnson Smith Co.); my teacher thought that it was the funniest thing that she had ever seen. Only a year later, my new teacher spotted it and threw a fit. She told me it was going straight to the principal’s office with my name on it. That was the last I heard of it, though; no lecture, no call to my parents, nothing.
Everyone on this school board should make like a leaf and get outta here.
You probably wouldn’t, once you’d thought about it, because unfortunately that does not help. It just means more money gets spent on the parts of modern education that you don’t want - which includes dealing with modern high-income parents who openly brag about “lawyering up” to bully school administrators - instead of on the kids.
I’m trying to figure out how – if the kid actually had marijuana, instead of a random tree leaf that was scientifically verified three times not to be marijuana – a full year of suspension from school is supposed to turn the kid’s life around and make him a better student/citizen/future corporate wageslave instead of, for instance, someone who has to resort to selling drugs to make a living.
I also wonder if they have the same punishment for, say, not showing up to school.
I feel sort of like I didn’t make enough of an effort that I only brought The Poor Man’s James Bond, The Anarchist Cookbook, and some How to Kill books to my school and said I was going to be an assassin when I grew up, if only I’d thought of bringing a leaf that someone else could say I said was pot. hoo boy!
Typically, yes. Zero tolerance, remember? Premeditated murder will elicit exactly the same response as littering. Because nothing is acceptable other than total obedience.
Sadly I’m not kidding. My son got pegged by zero tolerance many years ago, but because we are not poor or uneducated I was able to spend my way out of his difficulties. The poor, who are mostly people of color, do not have that option.
