Free Republic

A 17-year-old North Andover High School student was stripped of her captain's position on the volleyball team and suspended for five games after she went to a party to pick up an intoxicated friend, reports The Boston Herald. Erin Cox received a call from a friend, who was allegedly intoxicated, and asked her to pick her up from a party on Main Street in Boxford. Being a good friend, Erin went to pick her up, but instead met police just as they arrived at the house, the newspaper reports.

School “zero tolerance” policies claimed another victim as Massachusetts high school student Erin Cox was suspended from her volleyball team after giving an intoxicated friend a ride home from a party. Police determined that Cox had not consumed alcohol, and agreed that the honors student had only come to a party featuring underage drinking in order to make sure a friend got home safely. But Andover High School decided to punish Cox anyway, determining that she had violated the school district’s zero tolerance policy against drug and alcohol use. Cox was demoted from her position as captain of the volleyball...

It’s tough for Eleanor Cox to talk about how heartbroken her daughter Erin is over the punishment she received for doing what she thought was right. “She’s very fragile and I’m worried about her. Very worried about her. She didn’t do anything wrong,” Cox told WBZ-TV on Sunday. Two weeks ago, Erin received a call from a friend at a party who was too drunk to drive. Erin drove to Boxford after work to pick up her friend. Moments after she arrived, the cops arrived too and busted several kids for underage possession of alcohol. A North Andover High School...

An Alabama high school student killed himself after he was threatened with severe legal consequences — including registration as a sex offender — because he went streaking at a football game. The student, 15-year-old Christian Adamek, died from wounds he sustained while attempting to hang himself, according to The Daily Mail. Adamek ran naked across the field at a September 27th football game between his school, Sparkman High School, and Grissom High School. The incident was recorded and put on Youtube, and many students remarked that the prank had made Adamek — already a popular student, according to reports —...

A popular 15-year-old student has committed suicide after he reportedly faced expulsion and could have been placed on the sex offenders' register simply for streaking at a high school football game. Christian Adamek, from Huntsville, Alabama, hanged himself on October 2, a week after he was arrested for running naked across the Sparkman High football field during a game. The teenager died two days later from his injuries and on Wednesday, friends and family gathered at a memorial service as they struggled to comprehend the beloved student's death. A video of Adamek streaking during a game against a rival team...

PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) — Worries about injuries at a Long Island school have led to a surprising ban. As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.

The weapons-at-school hysteria generally peaks with a suspension. Not so for a high school student in Georgia who is facing felony charges because the contents of a tackle box in his car. 17-year-old Cody Chitwood was busted during a random sweep of the Lassiter High School parking lot by police and this student who has never been in trouble before now faces prosecution, large fines, prison time, and the loss of his plans to join the Air Force in the future due to a hysterical overreaction that has resulted in his arrest. Cody Chitwood, 17, is a senior at Lassiter...

A high school student who grabbed a National Rifle Assn. T-shirt in her hurry to find something to wear to school was later confronted outside class by campus officials who forced the student to remove her shirt or face possible disciplinary action, the girl’s parents said. Haley Bullwinkle heeded the demand, took off the white T-shirt and slipped on a school shirt that officials at Canyon High in Anaheim handed her, but came home confused and frightened, said her father, who got the shirt when he joined the NRA.

A pretend game of cops and robbers landed a Florida elementary school boy with a very real suspension after he made a pretend gun with his thumb and index finger. The mother of 8-year-old Jordan Bennett said her son was only playing with his friend at Harmony Community School in St. Cloud. She fears his one-day suspension, which was handed down Friday, wrongly labels Jordan as a violent person. “There was nothing in his hand. He used his thumb and index finger,” Bonnie Bennett told WKMG-TV. “It was a game. He made no threatening advances or threats to harm anyone....

There was a time in America when the first priority of our schools was educating our children. That's no longer the case. Today, schools are primarily job programs for the unions and indoctrination centers for the Left. The great teachers in our schools are now used as cover for the mediocrities, the overpaid administrators, and the blatant attempts to force feed liberalism to children before they become experienced enough to recognize all the problems associated with it. Since the Left has been losing the public battle to curtail the 2nd Amendment, liberals started fighting it in a place where they...

Yet another student has landed in trouble for having something that represents a gun, but isn’t actually anything like a real gun.This time, the student is 12-year-old Joseph Lyssikatos, a student in advanced math who had perfect attendance last year. The seventh-grader made the mistake of bringing a ridiculously small, silver keychain shaped like a gun to Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School in Coventry, R.I, reports local NBC affiliate WJAR.The two-inch keychain fell out of Lyssikatos’s backpack while he was at school.After another kid picked it up and displayed it to other students, a teacher intervened and impounded the keychain.Apparently fearing that the...

..In this ironic case, the 13-year-old unidentified girl, and the 12-year-old boy, are both on the sex offender list and are the victims in the case, because they had consensual sex with each other. The two violated a Utah state law that criminalizes having sex with a person under 14 years of age. Although they were both children, Utah State officials found them guilty of sexual abuse of a child....

Maine law allows police to arrest victims to make sure they testify http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/m...-they-testify/ CHELSEA, ME — A battered woman was arrested by police in an effort to force her to testify against her abuser. She was detained without charges, locked in a cage, and a bail was set. The startling practice of arresting the victim is actually legal in Maine, thanks to a seldom used statute. Jessica Ruiz, 35, was the alleged victim of domestic violence at the hands of 45-year-old Robert Robinson, Jr., in an April incident. On September 17, police arrested Ruiz to make sure she testified against...

WAVY, the NBC affiliate in Hampton Roads, Virginia asks “has zero tolerance gone too far?” as it reports this story: A suspended seventh grade Virginia Beach student will find out soon if he is expelled for the rest of the year for shooting an airsoft gun. Like thousands of others in Hampton Roads, Khalid Caraballo plays with airsoft guns. Caraballo and his friend Aidan were suspended because they shot two other friends who were with them while playing with the guns as they waited for the school bus. The two seventh graders say they never went to the bus stop;...

A seventh-grade student in Virginia Beach, Va., has been suspended from school for playing with an airsoft gun with a friend in his front yard while waiting for the school bus. WAVY-TV reports that 13-year-old Khalid Caraballo will find out soon if he will be expelled for "possession, handling and use of a firearm" because the guns were fired at two others playing in Caraballo's yard. snip The school's so-called "zero-tolerance" policy on guns extends to private property, according to the report. snip "It's on your school record. The school said I had possession of a firearm. They aren't going...

A Pennsylvania high school student has been suspended for what his attorney calls “doing the right thing”—handing in a pocket knife that he accidentally brought to a football game. … (David) Schaffner (III, 16,) was asked to leave the game and on Monday was handed a 10-day out-of-school suspension by the Fox Chapel Area school district. The district’s parent-student handbook says students who bring weapons to school or school-related events—including knives and firearms—can be expelled for a year, Triblive.com reports. …

A sixth-grader in Calvert County was suspended for forming his hand into a gun on his bus ride to school, an incident that adds to a string of recent high-profile cases involving punishments for children who gesture with imaginary weapons. Carin Read, mother of the 11-year-old student at Mill Creek Middle School in Lusby, filed an appeal of the suspension late last week, after a principal denied her request to remove the alleged infraction from her son’s school records. The boy had already served a day-long in-school suspension, and Read argued that he should not have a permanent record over...

The Missouri chapter of the NAACP appealed for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Secret Service to launch an investigation and open a federal case against the rodeo clown who donned a mask of President Obama’s face... ... the fallout so far has included the resignation of the head of Missouri’s rodeo-clown organization, and the announcement of Missouri State Fair officials that all rodeo clowns will now have to take sensitivity training as a condition of their employment. ... the clown who actually performed the skit... has been banned for life from state rodeo performances.

When Michelle Hammack,a teacher at the Little Temples Childcare facility in Arlington, Fla., smelled smoke and the children were napping, she rushed out of her classroom to investigate. Seeing that chicken nuggets were burning in an oven, she was able to put out the fire before even the fire trucks arrived on the scene, according to a report by WTEV-TV in Jacksonville. Her boss, however, wasn't impressed. On that same day, the owner of the childcare facility Olga Rozhaov fired Hammack. Rozhakov defended her decision to the media. "I fired her only because she left her room," she told the...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Dr. Imani Perry, Princeton professor, it’s YOUR fault that your sons cried at the George Zimmerman verdict Update: I sent an email to Dr. Perry with the link to this blog entry, and I told her, “I welcome you to show this to your students and anyone else whom you think might like to read it and comment on it.�Dr. Perry wrote back to me and said, “I will be reporting you to the police for harassment.� Princeton professor Dr. Imani Perry recently wrote:“My two sons, bright, creative and kind African American boys, aged 7 and 9,...

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been stripped of her European Parliament immunity and may now face charges of racism over comments she made comparing Muslims praying on streets to Nazi occupation during World War II. If found guilty of inciting racial hatred, she would face a maximum penalty of one year in prison and $60,000 in fines. In her speech, made in 2010 in Lyon and broadcast in France, Le Pen said that "more and more burkas" were being seen in France. "After that came prayers in the streets... I'm sorry, but some people are very fond of...

The 14-year-old battles the court during his summer vacation. By Ian Tuttle Jared Marcum is 14 years old. He just graduated the eighth grade. And if prosecutors in Logan, W.Va., have their way, he will be a convict before he can legally operate a motor vehicle. Jared was thrust into the national limelight when, standing in the Logan Middle School cafeteria line, he refused a teacher’s order to turn his NRA T-shirt inside out to hide its image of a hunting rifle. In the principal’s office, he explained that the shirt was not in violation of school policy and that...

When defending the liberty of unsavory characters, I usually write of my native England. Not this week, alas. In the state of Texas, a 19-year-old man named Justin Carter sits in prison, ruthlessly stripped of his freedom for making an offensive joke. After a Facebook friend with whom he played video games described him as “crazy” and “messed up in the head,” Carter replied — sarcastically, one imagines — “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.” He added “lol” and “jk”...

Texas teenager who has been in jail since March faces an eight-year prison sentence because of a threatening joke he made while playing an online video game. In February, Justin Carter was playing “League of Legends” — an online, multiplayer fantasy game — when another player wrote a comment calling him insane. Carter’s response, which he now deeply regrets, was intended as joke.

Man Rescues Bald Eagle, Could Face Jail Time An Indiana man was charged this week with the unlawful possession of a bald eagle, which the man says he cared for and rescued from the mud pit in which it was trapped. The former Department of Natural Resources employee, Jeffrey Henry, could face up to 60 days of jail time and a $500 fine as part of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, Yahoo reports: As reported by WISH News 8, Henry had the bird in his home for 11 hours after several weeks of caring for the sick animal...

The West Virginia eighth-grader who was suspended and arrested in late April after he refused to remove a t-shirt supporting the National Rifle Association appeared in court this week and was formally charged with obstructing an officer. As CBS affiliate WTRF reports, 14-year-old Jared Marcum now faces a $500 fine and a maximum of one year in prison. The boy’s father, Allen Lardieri, is not pleased. “Me, I’m more of a fighter and so is Jared and eventually we’re going to get through this,” Lardieri told WTRF. “I don’t think it should have ever gotten this far.” “Every aspect of...

Finally! We have common sense in our public schools, at least in one Virginia school district anyway. After two boy were suspended for “using pencils like guns“, the Suffolk School Board decided to review their current weapons policy, which was a very strict zero tolerance policy which left no room for interpretation. According to 10News.com, Under the revised policy, school administrators can look at factors such as intentions of harm and whether the object is listed as a weapon to determine the punishment. Ordinary objects will not be considered weapons A local television station reports that school board members voted...

Perhaps a suddenly firearm-friendly President Obama can put in a good word for Jared Marcum. In April, Marcum, an eighth-grader at Logan Middle School in Logan, W. Va., was arrested when he refused to take off his NRA t-shirt. The New York Daily News reports: The clothing kerfuffle began when Marcum wore a shirt bearing the NRA’s logo and a hunting rifle. As he stood in line in the cafeteria, a teacher ordered him to either change shirts or turn it inside out.Marcum declined and was sent to the office, where an officer was dispatched after he again refused to...

School officials in Calvert County, Maryland have denied a request to expunge the suspension of the kindergartener who brought a plastic cap gun on a school bus last month and then wet his pants during a subsequent interrogation. The refusal came in the form of a letter dated Friday, reports The Washington Post. The letter stated that the five-year-old “did bring a cap gun in his book bag.” It also charged that some other children were frightened and told school officials that they couldn’t discern if the orange-tipped cowboy-style gun was real or fake. The unidentified kindergartener had brought the...

The family of the 7-year-old boy from Ann Arundel County elementary school who was suspended for making a gun shape out of a pastry has tried to clear the boy’s record. This story made headlines across the country as the gun control debate has taken center stage among many elementary schools as some school administrators flex their muscles with a “zero tolerance policy” that excuses itself from common sense. But according to the Baltimore Sun school officials denied the boy’s family’s appeal on Monday, not allowing the boy’s record to be expunged of the incident. Robin Ficker, attorney for Park...

Elementary educators trying to discourage children from settling pretend beefs with pretend guns is nothing new. But in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting, and with the grownups increasingly polarized over the Second Amendment, rules for recess, on the bus and in the classroom have become stricter than ever. Some say too strict. “These zero-tolerance policies are psychotic, in the strict sense of the word: psychotic means ‘out of touch with reality,’” Dr. Leonard Sax, a Pennsylvania psychologist and family physician, and author of “Boys Adrift,” told FoxNews.com. *** “Out-of-touch policies such as these, which criminalize behaviors which have...

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill has a brilliant idea: he’s holding a toy gun exchange next Saturday in which students of the Hayward, CA school can turn in a toy gun to receive a book and a raffle ticket to win one of four bicycles. Really. Hill believes that children who play with toy guns may not think real guns are dangerous. “Playing with toy guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” he claims. Hill was inspired by a school photographer, Horace Gibson, who...

A Texas high school silenced its Valedictorian’s microphone during his speech when he diverted from his pre-approved remarks and instead spoke about the Constitution.

Liberals believe in creating institutions to solve problems. Conservatives believe the individual is better at solving problems. A 3 year-old deaf boy in Lincoln, Nebraska is being bullied by public school officials to change his name because the hand sign for Hunter Spanjer looks like a weapon. The Grand Island school district has a policy that forbids kids bringing to school "any instrument ... that looks like a weapon." They can't change the sign, because it's the official hand sign for his name, registered through S.E.E., Sign Exact English. Pressure from the National Association of the Deaf and the public...

The obvious answer here is that the last two decades' school shootings and our civilization's general moral decline have changed the equation. But while this would explain the desire to keep students with real firearms off school grounds, there is no logical reason to apply this to toy guns. Saying otherwise is like claiming that because you wouldn't trust an 11-year-old to drive the family car to school, you won't let him bring toy cars with him, either; or that he won't be allowed to possess toy airplanes because he isn't ready to pilot a 747 for Delta. The same...

OWINGS, MD -- The father of a middle schooler in Calvert County, Md. says his 11-year-old son was suspended for 10 days for merely talking about guns on the bus ride home. Bruce Henkelman of Huntingtown says his son, a sixth grader at Northern Middle School in Owings, was talking with friends about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre when the bus driver hauled him back to school to be questioned by the principal, Darrel Prioleau. "The principal told me that with what happened at Sandy Hook if you say the word 'gun' in my school you are going to...

A Canadian student in Calgary has been suspended for saving the life of a classmate from a knife-wielding bully, according to the National Post. 13-year-old Briar MacLean stepped in between an assailant, whose name has not been released, who was brandishing a knife while attacking another student. MacLean pushed the attacker away, and the bully was subdued. MacLean was thanked by the victim; the young man then went about his day at school. However, several periods later, according to both Briar and the school, he "got called to the office and... wasn’t able to leave until the end of the...

In the latest incident of anti-gun hysteria to erupt in a school setting, a kindergarten boy has been suspended from school for 10 days because he showed a friend his cowboy-style cap gun on the way to school.

Tuesday afternoon, a local elementary school student, Peter Collins, was arrested for bringing a “tornado in a bottle” to school for the annual Denysin Elementary science fair. Authorities were alerted after it was reported that a student had what appeared to be an “atmospheric weapon of destruction” on school grounds. The school was quickly evacuated, as the Denver bomb squad was called in to deal with collecting and neutralizing Collins’ second grade science fair project. Teachers close to Collins noted that Collins was a, “stellar student’ and they were, “shocked to learn someone like that could be capable of doing...

PALMER, Mass., - A Massachusetts woman said officials at her son's school have backed off plans to discipline the kindergartener for bringing a Lego gun on the school bus. Mieke Crane said she was initially told her son would have to write a letter of apology to the school bus driver, serve detention Tuesday and face suspension from the school bus for bringing the Lego gun -- which is slightly larger than a quarter -- on the bus to Old Mill Pond Elementary School in Palmer Friday morning, WGGB-TV, Springfield, Mass., reported Wednesday. "I think they overreacted totally. I totally...

My wife screamed “sick in the head� when we saw this on the local news tonight.We’ve previously covered the gun-shaped breakfast pastry and a pencil pointed like a gun.Now this:A Palmer, Massachusetts, 6-year old faced dentionand suspension, and was forced to write an apology letter for bringing a GI Joe Lego toy gun the size of a Quarter onto a school bus:[Video]Via WHDH ABC: A plastic LEGO-sized gun caused a disturbance on a Old Mill Pond Elementary School bus Friday morning.Mieke Crane is the mother of the 6-year-old kindergarten student who brought the gun on the bus.“I think they over-reacted...

In the annals of political correctness run amok in American schools, this story — if true — is easily an all-timer. A junior-high school Spanish teacher has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was fired from P.S. 211 in the Bronx in March 2012 because of a misunderstanding over the word “negro.” The non-tenured teacher, 65-year-old Petrona Smith, maintains that she was instructing her class about how to say the various basic colors in Spanish, reports the New York Post. The word “negro” naturally came up because “negro” is the Spanish word for “black.”A seventh-grade student in the class took...

This post is based in large part on an article titled Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally IllIs there a current tendency to consider those who cherish and seek to preserve our rights, including those under the First and Second Amendments, mentally ill for that reason? Interesting for the focused question it poses directly, the article should raise broader but similar questions about the current nature of academia in general. I have had no direct contact with academia since my years in undergraduate school (1959 - 63) and in law school (1963 - 66). "Back in the good old days," we were encouraged...

SUFFOLK, Va. — Two Suffolk second graders have been suspended for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.”

The liberal insanity continues… Little seven-year-old Christopher Marshall was suspended from school for holding a pencil like a gun. He was pretending to be a Marine. That’s not allowed at his school. [video] The boy has good grades and has never caused any problems in classes before. FOX 43 reported, via Legal Insurrection: A Suffolk school suspended a second grader for pointing a pencil at another student and making gun noises. Seven-year-old Christopher Marshall says he was playing with another student in class Friday, when the teacher at Driver Elementary asked them to stop pointing pencils at each other. “When...

Members of a boys 4 X 100 meter relay high school track team in Texas were left in tears last weekend after the University Interscholastic League of Texas disqualified them from competing in the state championships because the team's anchor runner made a "religious gesture" as he crossed the finish line to win their regional title. The runner, Derrick Hayes reportedly lifted a finger to the sky in celebration, as he wrapped up the win for Columbus High School. According to his father, K.C. Hayes, he was simply pointing to God. But UIL officials disagreed and slapped the team with...

Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot’s curiosity was apparently piqued when a friend told her that if you mixed hydrochloric acid and aluminum, an exciting reaction happened. So she did what countless amateur chemists before her have done: She went ahead and tried it. She mixed toilet bowl cleaner—essentially colored hydrochloric acid—and balls of aluminum foil in a small water bottle. The top of the bottle blew off with a satisfying bang, and there was even a puff of smoke. Unfortunately, Kiera got more excitement than she bargained for. When a teenage Oliver Sacks experimented with explosive reactions of aluminum in his basement...

OMG, Is this really the kind of society we want? Because this is what we get when people who are hell-bent on being politically correct all the time get their way. Blame them. Because they deserve the blame.