A facetious title for an unpleasant story.
The Washington Post has the details:
Earlier this school year, a sixth-grader in the gifted-and-talented program at Bedford Middle School in Bedford, Virginia was suspended for one year after an assistant principal found something that looked like a marijuana leaf in his backpack. The student, the 11-year-old son of two school teachers, had to enroll in the district’s alternative education program and be homeschooled. He was evaluated by a psychiatrist for substance abuse problems, and charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court.
In the months since September, he’s become withdrawn, depressed, and he suffers from panic attacks. He is worried his life is over, according to his mother, and that he will never get into college.
An eleven year old was charged (on the taxpayer dime, of course) for possession of a single leaf?
Bad enough, but wait there’s something else:
The “leaf” found in the student’s backpack wasn’t what authorities thought it was — it tested negative for marijuana three separate times.
The case was dropped, but that’s not the end of it:
[T]he school system, in a community located midway between Roanoke and Lynchburg, has been far less forgiving. That’s because stringent anti-drug policies in school districts in Virginia and elsewhere consider “imitation” drugs to be identical to real ones for disciplinary purposes…. It doesn’t matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf — okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc.
Grotesque, of course. Then again we live in a country when one of the reasons given for restricting e-cigarette use (for adults) is that they look like the real thing.
Back to Virginia:
The Bedford sixth-grader has been allowed to return to school starting today. But he has to attend a different school, separate from his former friends and peers, and he’s still under strict probation until this September. The terms of his original suspension letter state that he’ll be searched for drugs at the beginning and end of every school day until his probation is over.
It’s unclear what exactly transpired before the assistant principal discovered the leaf in the Bedford student’s backpack [plus, reportedly, a lighter: something that’s mentioned in the original Roanoke Times report]. School authorities say the student was showing it to other kids and telling them it was pot. The student’s parents say he never would have done such a thing, and that it was planted there as a joke by another kid.
Either scenario raises troubling questions given the severity of the punishment. Kids, especially at that age, joke about things all the time…..
Indeed they do.
Zero tolerance, zero commonsense.