The Kombucha Wars are in full swing.
The most recent battleground: Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach, CA.
The offender: an 11-year old, seventh-grade boy.
The offense:
having a glass bottle in his lunchbox on Oct. 9. School officials noticed that the label on the bottle of fermented tea said it contained less than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. District policy states that anyone who possesses products with even trace amounts of alcohol could be subject to discipline.
The punishment?
the boy was questioned by the vice principal the next day, with a school resource officer from the Newport Beach Police Department present. The boy was told that the consequences of possessing alcohol could include a referral to a program to treat youth substance abuse. The vice principal initially recommended a five-day suspension, but officials later decided against any such punishment.
The reaction:
The mother met with the vice principal, Mary Jo Vecchiarelli, later that day, but it didn’t go well. ‘My meeting with her made me feel, ridiculous, confused, outraged, ridiculed and blamed,’ the mother wrote on her own blog, called Fresh and Free in OC…After the meeting with the vice principal, Leslie G. took her story to Sarah Pope, who writes the Healthy Home Economist blog. Pope’s blog post Friday unleashed her army of readers. It has generated 19,000 Facebook “shares” and nearly 400 comments on the post alone, many of them brimming with outrage for the school administrators and their actions.
My verdict:
The kid gets treated like some kind of deviant–all because he brought a bottle of tea to school. How much time out of the Vice-Principal’s day did this cost? How much money are we wasting on this?
It’s another ridiculous overreaction by a school. Keeping a kid out of class for a day for a BS reason like this is proof positive that schools are becoming less and less about learning and more and more about behavioral control.
Let the kid have his ‘buch!
