Posted on 02/11/2006 4:11:34 PM PST by Revel
Boy charged with felony for carrying sugar
BY JUSTINA WANG A 12-year-old Aurora boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project this week has been charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug, Aurora police have confirmed.
The sixth-grade student at Waldo Middle School was also suspended for two weeks from school after showing the bag of powdered sugar to his friends.
The boy, who is not being identified because he is a juvenile, said he brought the bag to school to ask his science teacher if he could run an experiment using sugar.
Two other boys asked if the bag contained cocaine after he showed it to them in the bathroom Wednesday morning, the boy's mother said.
He joked that it was cocaine, before telling them, "just kidding," she said.
Aurora police arrested the boy after a custodian at the school reported the boy's comments. The youngster was taken to the police station and detained, before being released to his parents that afternoon.
"This is getting ridiculous," said the boy's mother. "They treated my son like a criminal. .. . This is no way to treat a 12-year-old kid."
East Aurora School District officials declined to comment on the case, citing privacy issues.
The district issued a written statement, which said: "The dangers of illegal drugs and controlled substances are clear.
Could get probation "Look-alike drugs and substances can cause that same level of danger because staff and students are not equipped to differentiate between the two."
The school handbook states that students can be suspended or expelled for carrying a look-alike drug.
Penalties for juveniles are decided on a case-by-case basis, but if convicted, the sixth-grader could likely face up to five years' probation, said Jeffery Jefko, deputy director of Kane County juvenile court services.
Juveniles who have prior criminal records could also be placed in a residential treatment program if convicted, he said.
Aurora Beacon-News
Bingo.
So...they're saying that they are punishing the kid because the school administration is too dumb to tell the difference between cocaine and confectioner's sugar?
No, -- you are about to find out how idiotic it is to walk up to a United Airlines ticket counter and claim you have a bomb in your bag.
Why has everyone been avoiding that question?
"Everyone's been avoiding this question . . . care to give it a try?"
"I walk up to a United Airlines ticket counter and claim I have a bomb in my bag. I am arrested. Am I innocent because there really is no bomb in my bag?"
____________________________________________________________
Since you don't get it, I will attempt here to explain it to ya. Everyone is avoiding you because they recognize your deceptive tactic as the red herring it is. IOWs, yelling fire in a crowed theater or robbing a bank with a water pistol or claiming you have a bomb at the ticket counter isn't even remotely associated with a child at school being arrested for possessing a bag of sugar...
25,or so, years ago, when this stuff was just getting started, my son was in a socialized school for a few months because we moved and the free market school wouldn’t let him in until the semester break. He wore a Coors tee shirt to school one day and they sent him home because it “promoted alcohol.”
The next day I sent him to school in a Coke tee shirt. The kids all got it, the dumb-a$$ed classroom bureaucrats never caught on.
So you are for enslaving the children to 'save the children'?
So you claim that legalizing drugs will "free the children"?
So, you claim that criminalizing drugs will "save the community"?
[moj the communitarian strikes again]
You are not acquainted with the current brand of 12-year-old classroom thugs, are you? Unfortunately, school administrators have little choice in reporting this sort of thing. If they handled it quietly and in house, then they risk a lawsuit for whatever reason from some unforeseen consequence of not coming down hard on this boy. I don't think this should be a felony offense, but there should be a punishment.
I don't know about the school mentioned in this article, but I do know that the kids in our local schools are taught all about drugs and look-alike drugs in D.A.R.E. classes. The kids here know better than to do what this child did. Of course, that never stopped 'em from doing what they want anyway.
I was just talking to my children about this, and I was wondering if there were a tv show that did this sort of thing recently. One child said Southpark has more than one episode where a kid takes fake drugs to school. I know he's only seen the show a few times, but yet he knows this. (he is 9) He said his friends watch the show all the time. He thinks he's seen it happen on another show, but older brother said he's wrong. I don't know. It just seems odd that there are a whole bunch of kids doing this in various parts of the country within a week or so of one another. Maybe some other FReeper could enlighten us all about this.
Heaven forbid that in the USA a TV show could have an episode about fake drugs in schools..
I'm shocked at the even the libertine concept! -- Land sakes, - what is this world coming to?
- Damned whippersnappers.
5.56mm
lol It's perfectly legal for a tv show to have characters who do stupid things. I was only trying to figure out what inspired the boy in question and some of my son's classmates to do this at the same time. Not that kids aren't creative enough to come up with the idea on their own.
(Meanwhile in a parallel universe ....)
Two weeks later, the kid brings that same pocket knife back to school, gets in a fight, and stabs another student in the eye, blinding him in that eye for life. The mother sues. The previous incident comes out in court testimony. The press goes crazy. The community is incredulous -- why didn't the principal do something before? Why wasn't this kid suspended? This could have been avoided!
Can't you just see the headlines?
So, the school gets sued for millions and the principal loses his cushy six-figure income because he gave the kid a break.
But it was all worth it because the principal exercised the "spirit of the law". Not in today's world, amigo. Those days are long gone.
So, are you saying that the school shouldn't have a policy against look-alike drugs, or they should have a policy against look-alike drugs, just not enforce it?
And you missed that the first time?
No, it appears you did. Comments are not testing results.
Look-alike drug = a substance which looks like a drug. In this case -- powdered sugar in a baggie, shown secretly to friends, told it was cocaine -- it qualifies as a "look-alike drug".
Save your technicalities for the judge. Maybe you can convince him.
Pure speculation ... and in any case it was not in fact cocaine.
The janitor is expected to keep quiet about this?
Red herring. The authorities are expected to not assume that jokes are meant seriously.
Did you then put that water in an empty vodka bottle and tell your friends at school that it was? Were you overheard by an adult? Did your school have a policy against doing that?
If the answer to all three is "no", then I'm not surprised at all.
Ah. You know exactly how this went down, huh? My description is just as likely, maybe more so, since it explains why the janitor reported it.
You can't explain it except to say the janitor shouldn't have believed the kid when the kid claimed it was cocaine, but he should have believed him when he said he was kidding.
Uh-huh.
"and in any case it was not in fact cocaine."
Neither the school nor the police said it was. If it was cocaine, he would have been charged differently.
He was charged with possessing a substance that looked like cocaine and was represented as cocaine to his friends. That is a Class 3 felony in Illinois. That is also against school policy.
The state and the school couldn't care less what the substance actually was.
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