8th grade honor student suspended for buying candy from classmate
Don't Tase Me, Bro! is a new blog by R.U. Sirius and Phil Leggiere about news on the state of civil liberties and personal freedom. Here's the most recent posting, about an eighth-grader who was suspended from school and stripped of his title of student body vice president for buying a bag of Skittles from his classmate.
What does it take for a school to suspend an eighth-grader, bar his attendance from an honors dinner, and strip him of his post as class Vice President? If you guessed drugs, alcohol, or a firearm, think again. A bag of candy is reason enough. This week a Connecticut school levied thse very punishments on an honor student with no history of misconduct, just for buying a bag of Skittles from his classmate. School officials are hiding behind their Wellness Policy--which prohibits bake sales, classroom pizza parties, and the sale of candy--as justification for the harsh disciplinary action.Link
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I wonder what his/her dealer got off with! (also what ever happened to sharing?)
When candy is outlawed, only outlaws will have candy.
I don't think they're "hiding behind" it -- that suggests that they have some nefarious, unspoken anti-Skittles agenda. It sounds more like they're just standing stupidly behind it in plain sight.
Wow, when I was a kid they gave skittles to kids for the vitamin C.*
Keeping junk food out of schools: good idea. Suspending students who buy candy: bad idea. If only they would ask me before making policy.
*Skittles contain 45% of the DV of vitamin C per serving (1.8 oz).
The case sounds absurd, and Don't tase me Bro looks interesting, but the story source appears to be an astroturf organization...
"The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit coalition of restaurants, food companies, and consumers working together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices."
Their current op ed "Preserve right to eat without guilt: Don't post calories of fast-food dishes
Americans should still have a right to guilt-free eating."
ie. The Center for Consumer Freedom is populated by that strange product which results when extremely stupid people mate with extreme self interest to produce extremely stupid self interested cretins.
My high school had a policy that you weren't allowed to sell things during school hours. Of course, this was ignored when fund raisers sent kids into the halls with boxes of M&M's, but there were always a few teachers who would get nasty about it.
Are they trying to ban candy? if so it's a bad idea to suspend the buyer and let the seller stay; there are bound to be other takers amongst his classmates!
Ah yes, deadly Substance S - Skittlecaine - a scourge and blight to todays elementary and middle school populace. I've seen too many good kids brought down by "sugar". It's an epidemic! It must be stopped before tragedy befalls You, or You, or You or, even You!
I did the "follow the breadcrumbs" game back to the original source, the New Haven Register, in case anyone wants to read it: http://www.apria.com/resources/1,2725,494-733341,00.html
I saw the same story on CNN.com ...
Truly the turrists have already won.
This is just too ironic to pass up. Here's a paragraph from the original news story in the Register:
"Michael Sheridan claims he was in a school hallway after lunch Feb. 26 when a classmate asked if he wanted some candy. The student had a lunch box filled with candy and a wad of money, he said."
So the school policy didn't get rid of candy. All it did was create a black market for candy. I wonder how much you can get in the teachers' lounge for a slice of pepperoni with olives?
I weep for this country as zero tolerance spreads. We are collectively losing our common sense.
Next week they'll be forced to dispense any fluids from their lunch boxes and take their shoes off before entering the school grounds.
WHAT is wrong with those people?!!
It's bad enough they thought it was a good idea - but that should have passed through their alleged minds rather quickly before being summarily discarded.
I think we should all start mailing bags of Skittles to the Principal - or is that "Principle", now they are obviously no longer any one's "pal"?
Sheesh!!!
I feel sorry for the kid.
Texas is really bad about this. We're going to lose snack machines because of the fat kids. We already got bottle sized cokes for a dollar sized down to cans for 75 cents. get this, though- at the same time as that they changed full sized power ade and vitamin waters and apple / orange juices down to mini 'health' bottles. still a dollar. This year, they decided to stop all candy sales over the size of .75 ounces- as though the fat kids will just buy one.
Thing is, they make this rule AFTER the beloved organizations like football go around and sell their wares. When ROTC comes time to sell candy, we got our things confiscated and Sergeant lambasted by the vice principal who has decided that we cannot sell those things anymore.
All this after we've purchased the boxes, so we get to run around door to door in the cold in order to sell the candy otherwise have to cover the difference.
I'd rather drink a juice and eat a bag of Sunchips or a pb&j cracker roll for my lunch than pick hair or who knows what from my mystery meat.
Yeah they have some strange logic. About a month or so ago my son,who is a sophmore and in the ushers club went to the school on a Saturday from ten til four o'clock to decorate for the Sadie Hawkins dance.Then he came home and got ready for the dance.When he got there he was told his dress was inapropriate as it was a formal dance and although he was neatly dressedthey wouldn't let him in.He got ahold of me at the otb and asked me to bring him a shirt and tie.Irushed to walmart and got ashirt and clip on tie and when I got to the school my wife had already come to the rescue.But while I was there a couple showed up looking really nice,had gone to dinner and pictures at the parents of one.Refused entry because they missed the cutoff time by ten minutes. Both situations imho could have been handled more tactfully and with more consideration of these young peoples intent.But then again rules is rules.
sugar is a drug
"Drug: Any substance which when absorbed into a living organism may modify one or more of its functions. The term is generally accepted for a substance taken for a therapeutic purpose, but is also commonly used for abused substances. Synonymous with medicine, pharmaceutical"
http://www.solvo.hu/Literature/glossary.html
Drug: Any substance which when absorbed into a living organism may modify one or more of its functions.
So...water? Sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium...
How about the school doesn't feed the kids crap or have junk vending machines, but kids can bring in whatever they want and/or their parents approve. The school does its part by not encouraging crappy eating, but doesn't turn food fascist. And has anybody mentioned that adolescents need more fat than adults in their optimal diet?
#3 posted by mattymatt
well mattymatt, skittles do encourage kids to "taste the rainbow"... sounds like an anti-gay conspiracy to me
Perhaps if he had just beaten the snot out of the kid and taken the candy, it would have been alright.
So, what sort of punishment will the kids get if they are caught smoking cigarettes? Summary execution?
"Umm, you're not losing them because of the "fat kids." You're losing them because of overprotective parents."
I phrased that badly, and rudely. Apologies. You're right. On a local basis, it may be the overprotective parents, but it also has something to do with childhood obesity in Texas, which is at a level similar to adulthood obesity in Texas- higher than national average (Houston, the biggest culprit.) I could see a few school boards being pressured into quitting contracts with Coke and Hostess because of overprotective parents- however, mMuch of the legislation has to do with the Something and Something or other, Texas Association of... Well, it really kills my argument that I can't remember the name of it, but if you're willing to take a dishonest teenager at her word, something to do with Health in Texas is pushing legislation to ban certain kinds and sizes of food in schools. They are doing this because of a desire to decrease the obesity rate, not realizing that the problem lies with the child, not the food. I don't imagine helicopter mommies populate every board legislating these kind of things in schools.
If overprotective mothers had that kind of power over public schools, we'd have a lot more trouble than me not getting my daily dose of caffeine.
And since I was already brutally unpolitically correct in my last post, I'm not saying there aren't people with disorders that cause them to gain weight. Sure there are, my grandma has a cocktail of diseased genes plus a ruined thyroid that send her weight skyrocketing and plummeting at other points.
Still, though- as the only person in my house that eats at all healthily or exercises, I think some of it must have to do with self-control. I have the self-control to monitor my diet, and the buying power to support it, I think it should be my school's decision to sell their souls to Coke so I can get my fix. (Could be contradictory that I say I can monitor my diet and refer to caffeine as my drug habit! Maybe we shouldn't have these things in schools where naive snowflakes could buy them.)
"So, what sort of punishment will the kids get if they are caught smoking cigarettes? Summary execution?
It's the only way they'll learn that smoking will harm their health. "
If you have tobacco anywhere on school property where I go, including in your car, you're subject to the reform school.
Robert Deniro? SKITTLES
Marlon Brando? SKITTLES
Rent or Reinbo
No dam RL Ranbo
Orson Wells. No 'b'. No SKITTLES.
R.U. Sirius tried to ride the coattails of Timothy Leary to fame, having missed out on the Beat Generation and the Summer of Love. He's really a druggie. I don't trust him. More of a politician than a philosopher.
Sirius is one name for the brightest star in the Southern Hemisphere, one that says in place enough to use for navigation and is MUCH brighter than the North Star (actually a binary of two stars) of the Small Dipper that the Big Dipper cup end points to, where water spirals down the shower drain the wrong way, and some idiots claim the moon looks upside down, since people "in China" are standing upside down vs. those of us in Europe and Northern America. That's racist! Chinks see upside down? Come on. Talk about slant-eyed stereotyping!
http://www.micalighting.com/3ptpanel.gif
Let's say you are standing upside down, in China. My Korean girlfriend says they see a bunny in the Moon instead of a "Man in the Moon." Maybe the bunny is upside down.
OMG, I just learned something. The moon *does* look upside down, down under!
http://au.answers.yahoo.com/answers2/frontend.php/question?qid=20070903232817AAJCQTn&show=7
Find the bunny. Down the rabbit hole you must go though. Having just taken LSD again (the only lasting claim to fame of Mr. Sirius), the moon isn't a man or a rabbit. It's god, created by an asteroid the size of Mercury smashing into the Earth when it was still over a thousand degrees.
To my mind, R.U. Sirius looks upside down, as in standing on his head. Is he a hero? Why does he disappear for three years at a time, then suddenly in truly Trust Fund manner, announce a "new project"? Ever since Wired Magazine trumped the zine (which Boing Boing used to be too) Mondo 2000, which you *knew* was losing money because the covers were all original oil paintings. Just kidding, but they cost as much, being printed on very thick card stock in more than four colors.
"Are U Serious" sounds like a Prince Song. EFF (funded by Grateful Dead Head songwriter J.P. Barlow) and the independent creator of the encryption software PGP (Phil Zimmerman) which the MILITARY classified as an export restricted "weapon" (!).
No wonder the NSA and DARPA are now funding quantum computation in Wiley E. Coyote desperation, as is China (who are ahead of us, since kids in the USA are idiots and now instead of 10% it's now 50% of American-trained Ph.D. students who GO BACK TO CHINA where the moon is upside down), who are trying to develop quantum computers for one reason: to break the encryption codes that PGP (public key cryptography) is based on.
But the old saw still holds. "Encryption always wins." Why? First it was computer power. Personal computers could up the prime number bits from 28 to 128 to 256, while NSA super computers could do the same but become less and less able to FACTOR large prime numbers and thus break the public keys of the bad guys, such as drug dealers or pedophiles or arms dealers etc.
But a quantum computer would factor a million digit prime in no time at all, in fact, in some way, yesterday.
What nobody realizes is that time actually runs backwards. We really do choose our parents. Actually it runs in two dimensions, more or less sideways, but though "god is in the details" these are not details, just the fact that two humans accelerated through two slits will result in a blood spatter pattern that shows that we too can act as waves, as soon as we can accelerate people fast enough.
Encryption Always Wins. Quantum computers? Try those on enfolded knot-theory public key cryptography. Try those on messages ENCRYPTED via quantum computation, Ludites. In the meantime, end the Drug War, so you can fight real crime, SUCH AS SOME KID BRINGING CANDY TO SCHOOL.
Re NikFromNYC @31: Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
NicFromNYC, as colourful (read:WTF?) as ever.
However, people in china see the moon in the same orientation as people in America and Europe, because they are all in the NORTHERN HEMISPHERE, unlike Australia, etc which do see it rotated +/- 180º.
And I don't know where the idea of China being on the 'opposite' side of the globe to America came from.. Perhaps it's political.
Wait! I think I've worked it out..
NikFromNYC, is really a cross-entropy neural-net (admittedly of an inferior quality to the one linked to) :D
Do I get a prize? Mr. Turing?
he writes better when he's drunk
update
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/13/skittles.suspension.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest
Thank goodness they're seeing reason.
"Zero tolerance policies" are a favorite insanity of bad school administrators. You enunciate a rule, then you slap the maximum penalty onto anyone whose behavior falls within the area described by the rule. It means you can boast about having a policy and enforcing it, but never have to use your judgement or assess the efficaciousness of your rule. This leads to honor students being expelled from school a month before graduation because they gave a fellow student a couple of aspirin, or because their father left a box knife in the back of their truck and an officious security guard found it.
When you hear a story about a school administration doing something that makes no sense at all, odds are there's a zero tolerance policy lurking in the background.