Student Expelled ... for Advil Posession?

Is it just me, or does this seem like egregious stupidity? “Zero-tolerance” and the “War on Drugs” have, it would appear, gone too far in some places in the US …

"Bossier School Board upholds Advil expulsion
Girl had over-the-counter pills in purse at school
Melody Brumble / The Times
Posted on December 5, 2003

Kelly Herpin and daughter Amanda Stiles, a sophomore, appealed the one-year expulsion to a Bossier Parish School Board committee Thursday night, spending about 10 minutes with the board’s administrative committee behind closed doors.

The committee and the full board voted unanimously to uphold an administrative decision that Stiles be expelled to the alternative school.

This has happened many times before. Sad, isn’t it?

It has been worse. A few weeks ago my daughter told me that a friend had been hauled into the principal’s office because someone saw her give another student a “pill”. It was a Tic-Tac breath mint.

Yep, that’s pretty fucking stupid.

A word to the wise. Don’t post a whole article, just post a link where we can click, and a snip of it. It saves the people who run the board any chance of copyright infringement problems.

/Usual junior mod disclaimer

so…by this same Zero-Tolerance rules, can a snarky parent insist that the school nurse be fired for giving out drugs?

I guess a lot of schoolboards that adopt these kind of zero-tolerance policies are trying to prevent any sort of abuse from any sort of prescribed or over-the-counter drugs.

Sorry, my bad - will do so in future.

Remember, common sense, perspective, and compassion have no place in our public schools!

I had to resist making a snarky call. 3 weeks ago my daughter tripped on the steps getting off the bus and bumped her arm pretty badly. She suspected it was broken. She went immediately to the clinic, where the “Nurse” wrapped an Ace Bandage around her arm and sent her to class. When I was informed 3 hours later, she (daughter) had wisely unwrapped her arm as it had swelled trmendously. I picked her up from school and promptly braced her arm in a magazine while we waited for X-ray results. It wasn’t broken, but, jeez, an Ace Bandage?

Online articles about the incident.

There’s not much you can say about shit this stupid. When I was in 5th grade (1989), a girl in my class volunteered to clean out all the desks in the classroom while the rest of us were at lunch. After lunch, I was confronted by the teacher regarding what was uncovered in my desk - a half red, half yellow capsule. DRUGS!

I calmly explained that it was a Tylenol Liquicap (or something like that) that was easier to swallow than the regular pills, and that I got headaches. She just gently scolded me and told me I should have checked the medicine in with the nurse and let her dispense it to me as needed.

That’s a pretty common-sense reaction to the incident. How do you go from that to expulsion? I wonder if they treat nicotine as a drug in the same way. That is, do students get expelled for smoking in the bathroom once?

When I was in high school a couple years ago, the girls had to stop carrying Midol and such because it was considered a drug and they could be expelled for having “drugs on campus.” However, the (male) administration hadn’t thought to buy any in the office and didn’t see the need. For a couple weeks, anyway. Us guys were real happy, let me tell you.

The sad thing is, if they DO let kids carry minor painkillers and such, one day a kid is going OD or something (and I had a friend that ODed on Tylenol) and then the parent’ll sue for blood.

Zero-tolerance policies are retarded. We have administrators in our schools for a reason. Things like this should be considered on a case by case basis. To just hear, “PILL!” and going running willy-nilly to the the infraction-punishment cross-reference chart is incredibly stupid.

Ferchrissakes, we try to let our kids have a little responsibility and then yutzes who make up rules like this yank it right out from under them.

My kids are 11 years old. If they have a headache, I trust them to be able to administer a fucking Tylenol to themselves.

I’m telling ya, mandatory plastic bubbles are just around the corner.

How do these dumb-ass zero tolerance school drug policies deal with kids that need to carry prescription meds with them (for example, kids that get migraines)?

Very poorly. Remember the debacle with the shared inhaler a while back?

Was she carrying a whole box or just the daily dosage? This is a very important question.

If she was carrying one of those 50-cent packets, and was about to use them, then the school was “a ass, an idiot”. However, if she was carrying a box of Advil, even the most Libertarian and anarchist here can recognize that that can lead to her to distribute the Advil to her friends in need. Now let your school be the one who has to tell the parents that a child is dead because a classmate gave her a drug contraindicative to either:

  1. the victim’s condition at the time, or
  2. other prescription drugs the victim might be taking.

I believe such incidents have happened, resulting in massive lawsuits against the city or other owners of schools. Thus the no-tolerance policy.

Hmmmm, I haven’t been in school for 3 years now, but I was never allowed to have pain killers at school. I went to school in Utah and California, and both had firm policies on that. Of course, that didn’t stop us. We just had to be sneaky about it…

I would assume that the policy of not allowing drugs, not even over the counter drugs, was explained to this girl at the beginning of the school year, along with the penalty for breaking the rule.

So she decided that the school’s rule was stupid, and that it was therefore okay for her to break it.

I do think the rule’s a little stupid. But when you knowingly break the rules, you shouldn’t be too shocked that the consequences apply to you.

The biggest problem I see in students is a failure to connect their actions to the consequences, or an inability to accept personal responsibility for their actions. If the school wants to keep this policy in place, it has to enforce it.

I haven’t been in public school since the early 80’s and otc medications were prohibited by threat of suspension and/or expulsion waaaaaay back then. Zero Tolerance is not new.

My school seven years ago+ had firm zero-tolerance policies for that, too. It’s such a dumb idea. So technically, every time I had cramps I was supposed to take time out of class so I could visit the nurse and get an ibuprofen. Yeah, right. Lots of kids carry non-prescription pain relievers and other no-big-deal pills like antihistamines with them in school. I did. Guess I was just lucky I never had my purse searched.

Seriously, schools need to find a balance in how they treat students. The constant lectures about how our teachers and principals “expected us to act like the young adults you are” coupled with the rules that assumed we all had the intelligence of five-year-olds made high school a more painful experience than it really had to be.

When I first heard about the incident, the word “Texas” immediately crossed my mind. Lo and behold, guess where the incident took place? Seems like most of thse zero-tolerance fiascos are from school districts in Texas and Florida.

When I went to high school (early 1980s), OTC meds were fine. Hell, prescription meds were fine, too, as long as stuudents weren’t distributing Schedule 1 drugs to others.