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.
