Circling the drain

This is the direction we're headed. My 13-year-old niece was suspended from school recently because she was "caught" with a small tylenol bottle with two (2!) tylenol tablets in her backpack. My brother and sister-in-law were ignorant to the fact that their school district, like most others in this country now, have a zero-tolerance policy toward such trangressions.

OK, so we have strict drug policies in our schools. Good deal! I'd certainly want to know if my teenage son or daughter was carrying a stash of pot or a vial of coke around school, and I'd be the last to whine about a kid being kicked out of school if he's selling crack in the bathrooms. But at some point, common sense MUST intervene. Are the idiots writing these rules THAT brain-dead?

Well, apparently so if you keep up with the number of rules our education (HA!) system has put in place during the last decade. The most infuriating aspect of the tylenol case, however, is that at this same school, like most others, this 13-year-old girl could become pregnant, and a school official could take her to a clinic for an abortion, and her parents would have NO RIGHT to know about it.

OK, let's review. Two tylenol tablets? Note from home signed by parents on file and approved in the school's main office. Abortion? Hey, we'll help you do it, and your parents won't ever find out!

(Imported from Nov. 4, 2005)