This is a very old story; the date is January 25th, 2016.

An old story, but there's no statute of limitations on the stupidity of zero tolerance policies.

This shit will stop when an angry crowd drags a stupid administrator out and applies tar and feathers.

"...applies tar and feathers...."

That gets old after a while. Glenn Reynolds uses the same phrase after some governmental outrage, but nothing ever happens. Everyone seems to say it, but Americans have a seemingly endless capacity for putting up with governmental misconduct. We're too well-behaved. We've become sheeple.

It's not a "very old" story; it's a story a few months old that somebody sent me. Unless the policies and administrators have changed dramatically in schools since January, it's still relevant.

Kids are not allowed to keep inhalers with them in many places. At BEST they can get one "in the classroom" which will be in a locked drawer in the teacher's desk. That works so well when the kids are in other classrooms half the time (lunch, PE, music, art, band/orchestra, recess), and substitutes won't have keys.

It's good to learn at an early age that your government considers you expendable

He's probably being punished because he made the teacher look bad. He did what the teacher, who is supposed to be the classroom leader and looking out for the students, should have done.

A word you see tossed around from time to time at the Samizdata site is "jobsworth," which, according to Wikipedia, "is a person who uses their job description in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner."

That seems to describe the Authorities in this story pretty accurately.

He was punished because he is a boy, and he carried a girl.

If a girl had done the carrying we would still be hearing about it being celebrated as an women-helping-women empowerment event.

As a nurse, my advice to parents of kid's who require availability of rescue medication: it needs to be On Your Kid. Have an inhaler or epi pen for the school nurse, sure, but once they can use it competently, they need one in their pocket. Better expelled than dead outside a locked nurses office.

Agree w/momof4.

How many nurses are at the school. Is there ALWAYS a nurse at school (called away for a meeting, helping another school, out that day, etc.).

Decades ago (walked uphill both ways times) I had to leave work to pick up my son because the nurse was out that day and he needed medical (non-emergency} attention. (He fell and had the breath knocked out him.)

Wankers.

He needs to learn early:

American women must enjoy the consequences of their actions.

We've endured the reports in the quadrennial ritual as long as I've been alive - "The R's can't keep up with the gender gap! The women voters are the swing voters!"

That means this government, this nanny state practice, is exactly what women want.

The state apparatus is angry because the boy did something to actually help a girl, when, invoking the most practical and useful definition, a feminist is a woman who hates women as much as she claims men do. This is just so inconvenient to that end that he had to be punished.

I agree with Patrick - their motive for punishing him has a lot to do with making the teachers look bad by doing what they should have done.

How to succeed in school in Venezuela:

At Maria's school, so many students have fainted from hunger that administrators told parents to keep their children home if they have no food. And while the school locks its gate each morning, armed robbers, often teens themselves, still manage to break in and stick up kids between classes.

The purpose of a public education is to produce compliant citizens. This is not unexpected.

"As a nurse, my advice to parents of kid's who require availability of rescue medication: it needs to be On Your Kid. "

Many schools will take it away if they find it. Because War on Drugs.

Asthma inhalers kept by teenagers usually get misplaced, get lost, get stolen, get set down somewhere and forgotten, get thrown away, get broken, get misused, get hidden, get played with, get shared... way more often than they get needed. And so the inhaler that's supposed to be with the kid and in working order when it's needed almost never is; and the nurse ends up having to go get a new one anyway.

As an RN who has worked with adolescents for years, I would say that in an environment full of adolescents, if you want asthma inhalers to be available when the children need them, then they should be kept out of reach of children, in some place easily accessible to the adults directly supervising the children who might need them. The adults should know where the inhalers are kept, and have some idea about how to take care of a kid who as asthma.

I acknowledge that this can be a problem if the adults have no more maturity or better judgment than an adolescent. If that's the case, then leave the inhaler with the kid and plan on calling 911 if there's an emergency - because there's a good chance the inhaler won't be with the kid when they need it.

Some children, especially some teenagers, are perfectly able to safely manage their own inhalers and other medications. Unfortunately, when they're at school those responsible children are surrounded by other children who are idiots.

As a nurse who has worked with adolescents for years, I'm 99% sure there's a whole lot more to the story above than is reported; and the story probably includes a lot of adolescent drama. The report contains only the account of the boy who got suspended.

Whenever there’s a medical emergency in an environment filled with adolescents, whether it's a genuine emergency or melodrama, drama queens and noble super heroes come out of the woodwork. There are plenty of grandiose boys and girls who believe they know waaaay more than any medically trained adult, and will directly interfere with the care of the victim. That's not good for the victim. I've sometimes had to use physical force to prevent those boys and girls from unintentionally doing harm - for example by trying to pick up or carry the victim - and to get them out of the way so doctors, nurses and paramedics, who are all incompetent in the eyes of adolescent rescuers and heroes, could have access to the patient.

If the scenario described above is accurate, and asthma girl really was in serious respiratory distress - to the extent that she was on the ground, semiconscious, unable to get up - notifying the school nurse by email was really stupid. But probably the stupidest thing the adults on the scene did was allow that adolescent boy to pick that girl up and carry her to wherever he went with her. They should have used force if necessary to stop him from doing that.

Unless the environment a patient is in is immediately life threatening - e.g. inside a burning car or building, or in the middle of a road on a blind curve, or in the water - even a fit, strong, trained, adult fireman or paramedic doesn't single-handedly pick a victim up and run with them for help. He brings help to the victim.

The risk of falling and causing more serious injury is way too high. If that heroic but foolish boy had fallen, he or girl could have… and the girl who was supposedly already in serious danger probably would have… been more seriously injured; and her parents would be screaming bloody murder about negligent school officials who would have hell to pay for allowing such a stupid thing to happen.

Asthma girl should have been kept still, where she was, watched closely and reassured; and the heroic boy should have been sent fleet of foot to retrieve the nurse. If the nurse did not arrive with an inhaler within a very short time, then two of the 25 or so cell phones present in any classroom full of teenagers should have been used to call 911. In fact, if asthma girl was in so much distress that she was on the ground, semiconscious and unable to keep herself upright, 911 should have been called immediately, as well as the school nurse.

> he was a pretty terrible Muslim,
> truth be told. But in his mind he
> went out in a blaze of glory paying
> homage to his religion

Yes.

And Amy's incessant, unread, shrieking spazzmatosis about this illiterate & violent subset of the faith, a minuscule fraction of the belief system as a whole, does much to encourage these doorknobs. As Hitchens put it, "Power is what you allow it to be"... And as Gozer put it, Amy has "chosen the form of the destructor.

    Doorknob (interior dialogue):

 So violent Moozlim extremists
 are what sophisticated beach ladies
 in evening gowns are most afraid of?
 So that's where the really masculine
 stuff is?  Not soldiers? Not gang-
 bangers or rappers or athletes or
 academic types? Just violent Moozlims?

 Well, that's what I'll be then!  That's
 how they'll remember me, the mostest
 violentest Moozlim evar!  More violent
 than Isis or Il Qweadia or the little
 insurance salamander or any of those
 fuckers!

 The Redhead Beach Evening
 Gown woman with the flyswatter will
 remember me as being the most meanest
 and manly Moozlim of them all!

Goddamit wrong thread.

"Odendamit wrong thread."

No, no, just change 'moozlim' to 'school administrator' and you're on to something.

Um... Yes! Exactly, Gog!

Um... Yes! Exactly, Gog!

As a nurse who has worked with adolescents for years, I'm 99% sure there's a whole lot more to the story above than is reported. [...] ~ Ken R at June 21, 2016 11:36 AM

Ken R, interesting you bring that up. It's not just adolescents.

Periodically, over the years, I've trained and re-trained in first aid and one of the things the trainers emphasize is taking control of the situation. One of the methods they often propose is assigning jobs to bystanders (as you suggested), often repetitively since once out of the spotlight, many bystanders simply walk off and that guy you sent outside to call 911 and wait for the ambulance is now at a Starbucks down the street getting a half-caff latte and telling everyone about his heroics while 911 remains uncalled.

Television has done inestimable damage to first aid, showing all the wrong ways to do things in favor of creating a dramatic moment. The precordial thump makes for great television, but deadly first aid.

A friend who rides motorcycles plastered his helmet with bright orange "Do Not Remove Helmet" stickers after witnessing untrained people at an accident remove a motorcycle rider's helmet and prop his head up on a makeshift pillow.