The idiotic story you are about to read is true.
Rachael Greer, a seventh grade student in Jeffersonville, Indiana, explains that a girl walked into the school locker room with a bag of pills during Rachel’s gym class.
“She was talking to another girl and me about them and she put one in my hand and I was like, ‘I don’t want this,’ so I put it back in the bag and I went to gym class,” said Rachael. The pills were the prescription ADHD drug, Adderall. During the next period, an assistant principal took Rachael out of class. The girl who offered her the pills and a few other students had been apprehended, and to her surprise, Rachel was to join them in their punishment.
Why, you ask? Well, the school suspended Rachel for five days because one pill was briefly in her hand before she refused it. Although administrators do not doubt Rachel’s account, which was also corroborated by the girl with the pills, she touched the pill, and according to the school’s no-tolerance drug policy, even a touch means she was guilty of drug possession.
What useful principle or lesson could this lazy, reckless, unfair, unjust rule teach students? Only that their lives are at the mercy of cowardly, irresponsible, cruel and dim-witted adults until they graduate. Eventually these tales of mistreatment of students by incompetent teachers and administrators blur together, but the image of America’s children being abused and warped by arrogant fools lingers.
Ethics Alarms 
What else is there to say? What else can be said? What else needs to occur?
Zero Tolerance should be added right at the bottom of the list of disproven and obsolete theories, with Phlogiston theory, the geocentric universe and “Rain Follows the Plow.”
You win my respect and undying gratitude for dredging up “Phlogiston”!!!! Does that ever bring back memories….!
What, you already have the luminiferous aether, Lamackian evolution, telegony, the four bodily humours, the Open Polar Sea, spontaneous generation, and “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” at your fingertips? Phlogiston, take a number.
The “dim-witted” part of your conclusion is the one that strikes me.
These are the people charged with the oversight of America’s educational system.
Is there no depth to which people will allow unintended consequences to sink?
So, the Assistant Principal says that the punishment (actually, in the world of education, we say “consequences,” but let’s be honest here) would have been the same even if Rachael had reported the incident immediately. Maybe. But the same administrators who perpetrate these sort of idiocies also complain of a “code of silence” among students that is, supposedly, one of the major reasons drug and weapons (etc.) violations can occur.
“Drugs and weapons in our school, after all our rigorous enforcing of the rules? No, we’re being undermined here, and by our own students no less.” I suspect that had Rachael immediately raised an alarm, the school administrators would have taken a somewhat different view of her actions, and she might have gotten off more lightly.
Well, anyone who remembers their school years well, knows that that is asking a lot of teenagers. They are painfully aware that after the immediate hoo-rah subsides, they have to go on living, day-to-day, with everyone else in the school, most especially the perpetrator she narked on, and any friends said perpetrator may have. Would the school then have been able to prevent Rachael’s already difficult middle-school passage, from being made even worse by those students bent on a little payback? Don’t make me laugh.
Rachael was put in an impossible situation for someone her age and in her position. She did the best she could, and what, in fact, she had been taught to do. DARE and other school programs tell students to just say no to drugs, but the underlying message is “Unless you end up in the same room as someone peddling drugs, in which case we’ll treat you the same as the dealer.”
Jack, you have branded school administrators who mindlessly enforce zero-tolerance policies as gutless idiots (well maybe not those exact words, but….). I agree with you, but would add that you’re perhaps going a little easy on them. But only perhaps, restraint, after all, can often be a virtue as well.
Tough balance, I find. I get slammed all the time for periodically indulging my long-standing talent for invective. If I ever let go of the reins, watch out.
I find it interesting in the news article that this guy was ready to stand by the suspension no matter what.
So the rule actually is in this school: If someone tells you to put out your hand, you must verify and certify that no drug substances will be placed into your hand.
I think that’s where I’m having trouble with this whole scenario. By all accounts, the pill was placed into her hand. I might actually be okay with the suspension if the story was that she fished a pill out of the bag and then changed her mind.
Tim, surely you don’t mean that if she had reached into the bag herself, that would have justified the school’s action all by itself? This is a teenager we’re talking about here. Teens raised in a (relatively) safe, middle-class environment are, more often than not, naive and trusting.
So if such a teenager is approached by someone they have no reason to distrust, and that someone sticks out a bag and says “Here…take one of these. You’ll like it,” what might well happen? Now, I remember those years of my own life well, and know that in such a circumstance, I might well have reached out and taken one, A moment or two later, after it finally dawned on me what the things in the bag actually were, I’d like to think that I’d have done what Rachael did. That is say no, and give it back.
Remember, for teenagers thought frequently follows action, and not the other way around. This is why otherwise good kids can do reprehensible things. Having done such things, they have to answer for their actions, yes, but we (who are presumably wiser) should be willing to temper our judgements with a little understanding.
All of this is somewhat beside the point, however. The plain fact is that a teenage girl, when she understood what it was she was being asked to do, went and did the right thing. As she had been taught to do. Given that, I would have thought they’d be giving high-fives all around in the school’s administrative offices: “There’s one student who’s been successfully educated” But no, gutless bureaucrats are as gutless bureaucrats do. and all they could be guided by was the most strict and literal interpretation of their own rule book.