Often when there are reports about a kid being expelled from school for a year for saying boo!! to a teacher, or some such non-mega crime, I hesitate to join the chorus of derision, because this could be and probably was merely the final straw in a vast hay-rick of indiscipline, and because in any case I favour the right of institutions to expel people irrationally on the same basis that I favour the right of people to leave an institution irrationally. It's called Freedom of Association, and I think that the principle of Freedom of Association should apply just as definitely to education and schooling and so on as it does to sports events or art exhibitions or the comments sections of bossy blogs such as this one reserves the right to be (in case you were wondering). If you don't want to be involved, you shouldn't have to be, and if the owners of the thing don't want you in or on their property, they should be able to expel you. If you think that makes them bastards, well then, why are you so keen to go on associating with them?
All of which is an unwieldy preamble to what really does look like a piece of official idiocy, which really should be jeered at by the entire interested blogosphere, unless compelling evidence later emerges to the contrary. Here's the story from Yahoo:
A teenager was disciplined for sharing medication used to treat asthma, but he said it saved his girlfriend's life, News2Houston reported Wednesday.
Andra Ferguson and her boyfriend, Brandon Kivi, both 15, use the same type of asthma medicine, Albuterol Inhalation Aerosol.
Ferguson said she forgot to bring her medication to their school, Caney Creek High School, on Sept. 24. When she had trouble breathing, she went to the nurse's office.Out of concern, Kivi let her use his inhaler.
"I was trying to save her life. I didn't want her to die on me right there because the nurse's office (doesn't) have breathing machines," Kivi said.
"It made a big difference. It did save my life. It was a Good Samaritan act," Ferguson said.But the school nurse said it was a violation of the district's no-tolerance drug policy, and reported Kivi to the campus police.
The next day, he was arrested and accused of delivering a dangerous drug. Kivi was also suspended from school for three days. He could face expulsion and sent to juvenile detention on juvenile drug charges.
My thanks to Dale Amon for alerting by email me to this seemingly quite mad story. He came across it in James Taranto last week. (While your at Taranto's, take a look at his next story also.) Even from across the Atlantic, this really does look like, in Dale's words, "one for the home schoolers". I'm sure I'm not the only one saying this.
These "zero tolerance' nitwits drive me crazy.
In another bit of perversity, the teacher's union in Detroit -- a city with a truly terrible school system -- has demonstrated and protested and apparently driven away an attempt to donate $200,000,000 dollars to fund new high schools.
http://www.mackinac.org/article.asp?ID=5811
The kids in question are, in fact, being withdrawn to homeschool (bottom of piece):
http://www.click2houston.com/news/2547143/detail.html
My (leftist, non-believer in private schools non-believer in selective schools, who sent me to a horrible comprehensive) schoolteacher father (who incidentally is an absolute expert on the subjects he taught and was far far more determined to actually teach students than the vast majority of schoolteachers) complained more than anything else practically about the fact that headmasters in state schools in Australia were essentially unable to expel disruptive, violent, and otherwise undesirable students. I now tend to think that this is an inevitable logical consequence of the very idea of compulsory education, and state education, but my Dad never really asked these questions. And I don't know why he didn't, because he is actually a very smart guy.
I know a good fellow, creative and critical, soft-spoken and outspoken, doing well as a professional trance DJ in New York City (shout out to DJ Spiral, hey dude!). He graduated from the school in question a few years ago. He always tries to be fair 'cause he knows I won't put up with hysterical hyperbole, but he has a thousand miserable stories to tell about the place, and I've spoken with other graduates who confirm his stories and tell worse.
This story just utterly failed to shock or even surprise me. But like I said, I know some things about the school.
That was me largely agreeing with Brian on the first part of the post, which is that schools should be able to expel essentially who they want. I agree that this story sounds absolutely bizarre, so bizarre that I wonder whether we are hearing the whole story. Or it could just be another sign that the War On Drugs is insane, which I knew already.
Michael --- Yes, the government forces in the War on Drugs are winning the battle against sanity and common sense.
There have been a (large) number of instances here in the U.S. of children being suspended from school for "drug" offenses, such as one girl giving another an aspirin tablet for menstral pain, etc.
That is because we must have "zero tolerance" for drugs. Also zero tolerance for weapons and violence. This has resulted in students being charged with weapons violations -- such as a grade school child whose mother packed a plastic knife in her lunch bag -- or the child who realized that his boy scout jackknife was in his backpack and he knew that was against the rules so he went to turn it into the office and was charged with having a banned weapon in school -- it has even (I am NOT making this up) resulted in a 6 year old boy being suspended for pointing a piece of chicken in the cafeteria and saying "bang bang"
And these idiotic school administrators (with their ed. doc. degrees and all of their certificates and licenses and their salaries that are much higher than teacher salaries) maintain that it isn't their fault, their hands are tied, they are just following the zero tolerance guidelines. To which my suggestion is that we replace all of the $120,000 per year administrators with a minimum wage entry level clerk -- after all, if there is no discretion required (and common sense is banned) then there is no need for decision-makers with advanced academic degrees.
