Well, I'm guilty of some sarcasm in that title..the devil made me do it.
Here's the story:
news.yahoo.com...
A middle school student was suspended for three days for sharing chewing gum because it contained caffeine, school officials said.
The girl, whose name and age were not released, gave another Huston Middle School student Jolt gum. The gum is "a stimulant that has no other
redeeming quality," said Amy Palermo, schools superintendent.
Products acting as a stimulant are prohibited and possessing them is grounds for disciplinary action, and the suspension was mainly based on the
girl's decision to share the gum, she said.
I'm sorry folks, I do my best but I can't possibly keep up with all this nonsense. There are simply too many instances of this story, or stories
very similar, in the news these days. Where once a stern talking-to or a call to parents sufficed, now we're dealing with arrests and charges and
suspensions for everything under the sun.
I have to say, I understand completely the desire of the school to limit students' access to drugs, of all sorts, and their motives are not in
question. What I want to know is, why on earth would you suspend the student? Who does that help, exactly?
When I was in school, suspensions were considered 'mandatory vacations' by the bad kids (like myself). If you want to punish a kid, sending them
home from school is a pretty poor way of doing it, I mean, really...
I guess it's good they didn't have her arrested for dealing drugs, which has happened before, when students shared aspirin or tylenol or the
like.
But that aside, why can't parents take the hint already? The state can't educate and properly raise children, so parents are going to have to pick
up the slack left by the institutions tasked with picking up parental slack...
See how this works? Except nobody's picking up any slack, and the slack is reaching epic proportions... Parents have nobody but themselves to
blame, they're the ones supporting this crazy, inefficient, even cruel school system.