Really Stupid 'School Administration' Behavior
These are a mere sample -- Only Space and Your Tolerance Prevent Me From Listing Many More
Zero Tolerance laws serve one valuable purpose in child development -- they teach children some of lifes most valuable lessons. Life is Not Fair Distrust Adults Doing the Right Thing Isn't Necessarily the Right Thing Distrust Authority The Police are Not Your Friend If we want children to learn just how arbitrary and corrupt the adults in power can be, then we're succeeding quite well.
Some of the Rampant Stupidity
	Administration at Roscoe Middle School banned 14 Year Old C.B. and others from wearing any form of metal bracelet, anklet or necklace to school because they constituted weapons.
	Fifth-graders in California who adorned their mortarboards with tiny toy plastic soldiers to support troops in Iraq were forced to cut off their miniature weapons.
	Rubber bands are a controlled item at Young Middle Magnet School of Mathematics, Science & Technology in Tampa FL.In a December newsletter, the Buffalo Bulletin, administrators warned parents and students ... "There have been recent incidences of students at our school using rubber bands as a method of projecting objects at other people." "Rubber bands are not permitted at school. If students are in possession of rubber bands for any reason they will be subject to consequences that may include out of school suspension." "When rubber bands are required for classroom use, they will be provided and collected." What's next, banning of ball point pens and soda straws as the students switch to deadly spit balls?
	"A 13-year-old student in Orange County, Fla., was suspended for 10 days and could be banned from school over an alleged assault with a rubber band..." "Robert Gomez, a seventh-grader at Liberty Middle School, said he picked up a rubber band at school and slipped it on his wrist." "Gomez said when his science teacher demanded the rubber band, the student said he tossed it on her desk." "After the incident, Gomez received a 10-day suspension for threatening his teacher with what administrators say was a weapon..." "The district said a Level 4 offense includes the use of any object or instrument used to make a threat or inflict harm, including a rubber band."
	"Two boys, ages 9 and 10, were charged with felonies and taken away from school in handcuffs, accused of making violent drawings of stick figures." "The boys were arrested Monday on charges of making a written threat to kill or harm another person, a second-degree felony. The special education students used pencil and red crayon to draw primitive stick figure scenes on scrap paper that showed a 10-year-old classmate being stabbed and hung, police said."
	VA: Joyce Heath said her 8-year-old son returned to school yesterday after a seven-day suspension for carrying a butter knife to school with his lunch. Nicholas, a third-grader, initially was suspended for 10 days and faced the possibility of being placed in disciplinary classes for a year." Heath said she packed a butter knife in her son's lunch along with a package of peanut butter and jelly on Oct. 1. 'I didn't think about it,' she said. (Caution - In Some California Schools, Posession of a Peanut is grounds for expulsion - honestly ... )
	A Texas school district tried to expel a 16-year-old high school student for a year when a butter knife was spotted in the back of his pickup truck.
	Wisconsin: A sixth-grader gets suspended because of a science project. The project involved cutting an onion. He brought a kitchen knife to school.
	Texas: This zero-tolerance idiocy comes from Ft. Worth. Cory Henson plays baseball on the Diamond Hill-Jarvis baseball team. In the trunk of his car is his baseball equipment, including aluminum bats. In the front seat of his car we have a souvenir baseball bat. It is made of wood and 8” long. That’s not as long as a piece of copy paper is wide. Ft. Worth government school officials decide that the 8” bat is a weapon! The real aluminum baseball bats aren’t.
	Missouri: It is just a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. A fifth-grade student draws a picture of an airplane flying into a building. Suspended.
	A third-grader has a brother serving in the Army in Afghanistan. The proud third-grader draws a picture of his brother. The drawing shows his brother with a gun. Suspended.
	Havre [MT] Public Schools Superintendent Kirk Miller said an 11-year-old student brought an unloaded .22-caliber pistol to Sunnyside Intermediate School with the intent to turn it over to school authorities. The child immediately took the weapon to the school principal, Miller said. The gun was missing a part and could not be fired. Havre police responded at 8:51 a.m.. and took the juvenile to the police station for questioning. He was issued a summons on a charge of possessing a weapon in a school building, police said."
	Seven fourth-grade boys in Centennial, Colo., were sent home from Dry Creek Elementary School for pointing their fingers at each other like guns in a game of army-and-aliens on the playground.
	Three seventh-graders in a South Side Chicago public grade school were charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver after school officials found them selling plastic bags of purple powder for a quarter each. It was grape Kool-Aid powder. They told school officials it was grape Kool-Aid to no avail, said their attorney, Michelle Light. "They were rounded up and hauled off down to the police station," Light said. "No one ever suggested it was anything but grape Kool-Aid." Even when a lawyer from the national firm of Baker & McKenzie stepped in, prosecutors refused to drop the charges and wanted the boys to agree to counseling. After three months, prosecutors finally agreed to test the purple powder. It was (surprise) Kool-Aid. Charges against the boys were dropped.
	A Florida high school student tape recorded a chemistry lecture against school policy. Was she reprimanded and sent back to class with a stern lecture? NO! She was criminally charged under the state Wire Tap law.
	A 12 year old girl gets a year in custody for sexual assault for going on a "Play Date" with two 11 year old girls.
	Schools are banning dodge ball and tag because the games encourage "violent behavior."
	Some schools are removing any references to the military from their libraries, and some high schools are banning military recruiters.
	Elementary students in Texas and Louisiana have been suspended for pointing pencils and saying "pow" and drawing pictures of soldiers. A fifth-grader in St. Petersburg, Fla., was arrested for drawing pictures of "weapons."
	Students in Mississippi were held in jail for throwing peanuts at one another.
	"Terrorist threat" criminal charges were filed against two 8-year-olds in Irvington, N.J., for "playing cops and robbers with a paper gun."
	A young boy is suspended from elementary school for pointing his finger at someone and saying "Bang." It seems the school's Zero Tolerance rule extends to "Pretend" guns, including fingers.
	Another school will let kids point fingers, but only if they have a "Permit."
	6 year old tossed out of school for bringing in his father's pager for show and tell. It seems it's classified as drug paraphernalia.
	A Boy Scout (excellent 'A' student) returning from camp was suspended from school because he left his axe and knife in his car along with the rest of his camping gear.
	An 11 year-old girl was suspended for 10 days from Garrett Middle School in Atlanta. It seems that the (10 inch 'bead type') chain connecting her key ring to her Tweetie Bird wallet was in violation of the school's "Weapons Policy."

Stupid prosecutions and errant behaviour aren't limited to kids either.

A North Carolina man, Jerry Ward was prosecuted, convicted and fined under a little-used 1805 Adultery Law. He admitted co-habiting with his girlfriend and having sex. District Judge Jimmy Myers, a bachelor and ordained Methodist minister, prosecuted Ward and his girlfriend Wendy Gunter, who is estranged from her husband. The adultery law prohibits a man and woman who aren't married to each other to "lewdly and lasciviously associate, bed and cohabit together". A request to have the charges thrown out were denied, reports The Charlotte Observer. The case came about during evidence given at a custody hearing over Mrs Gunter's children.

A veteran DC Policeman issued 28 parking tickets for failing to park with the front wheels turned to the curb, ON A LEVEL STREET! Meanwhile real criminals are at work two blocks away.

During Tropical Storm Floyd a woman allowed neighbors (who had to flee their homes because of rising waters) to bring their pets to her home where they'd be safe from the floods. She saved 97 animals. She also received a summons for setting up a "temporary animal shelter", and faced a $1000 fine. Charges were eventually dropped, but she was warned not to illegally save any animals' lives again.

Average speed on the Washington Beltway (non-rush hour) is 70 mph in the slow lane. If you do the 55 mph speed limit you'll get run over by the big rigs. Who gets the ticket? Uncle Earnie for doing 60 on an entrance ramp so he won't be rear-ended or pushed onto the shoulder when he tries to merge.

My street corner is a good place for the police RADAR to hide. I've watched them pull hundreds of automobiles, but never one of the dump trucks or busses that regularly speed up the street. I finally asked the officer why he wasn't pulling over the trucks and busses. His reply..."this is how these people make a living. If they get a lot of tickets and lose their license they'll be out of work." DUHHH!

Don't give that dying patient a few days of comfort before he dies because the drugs he needs are illegal. (We wouldn't want that terminal cancer patient to become an addict in the week he has left to live, would we?)

You can't buy pot within a hundred miles, but go downtown and a twelve year old can easily get Cocaine, Crack or Heroin.

While we're at it, let's keep the prohibition on Industrial Hemp in place. (Contains NO psycho-active substances, and is NOT a drug.) It does, however, provide more pulp per acre than most trees and Hemp oil is an excellent fuel. This would be a great crop for displaced tobacco farmers. Now that the patent on Nylon has expired perhaps duPont will 'allow' the government to revisit this issue.

The war on drugs is another Viet Nam. A major difference, of course is that we are our own enemy, but it's a no-win war full of civilian casualties just the same. For a fraction of the drug enforcement budget we could BUY all of the Cocaine producing land in Columbia.

In the middle of an energy shortage (we should have learned our lesson in the 70's) we're considering making running lights on cars mandatory. Let's do the math . . .

Est. 20 million vehicles on the road at a given time x 40 watts per vehicle = 800 Megawatts of electricity, enough for a small city. Extremely inefficient internal combustion engines running on polluting fossil fuels are generating this.

A government agency meets the end of the fiscal year six million dollars under budget. As a 'reward' we cut their appropriation by that amount next year. What if we gave four million back to the general fund and divided two million of it up among employees at that agency? Instead, as October (the end of the government fiscal year) approaches, there is a government spending frenzy. Contractors and vendors can literally sell Uncle Sam anything at any price, needed or not. After all, "if we don't spend it, we lose it,."

Why are we (The USA) Still buried in the antiquated English system of measurement when the rest of the world is Metric? This necessitates the expense of dual tooling for just about everything and ups the cost of even imported items. (Japan is Metric, but many items they make for export to the USA have to be English.)

When are the powers that be going to wake up, display some common sense and admit they are STUPID to seven decimal places?

When are the people who are supposed to be in charge of this country (the voters) going to take it back?

But that's another rant!

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