crime.

held accountable and disciplined. These individuals making these decisions and those taking stupid actions need to be held accountable and seriously reprimanded/disciplined.

I had a nephew who had to make a leaf collection for his 6th grade science class. He collected a couple dozen different species of tree leaves, taped them onto construction paper and labeled them. It's good thing his mother examined his project bore turning it in because he had to do part of it over. He had one leaf from a tree in his grandfather's backyard and he asked his grandfather what kind of tree it was. His grandpa told him and he labeled it as a leaf from a "piss elm". (Elm drip a lot of sap.)

in high school. If I had found a marijuana plant, I'd probably have included the cool looking leaf, not even knowing what it was.

Jesus Christ, this zero tolerance stuff is getting totally out of hand.

I need to send this on to others. Why are people so DUMB??? The poor kid.

on firearms either, yet many DUers think it would be a good idea.

Do you see the Thompson submachine gun in the NORML photo?

The prohibition on that type of weapon has been wildly successful. Of all my crazy gun nut friends, none of them own a full-auto weapon.

passed a background check and had enough money to buy the Thompson.

Thank you for admitting that gun regulation can work.

is treating it like the war on drugs.

Minor violations should result in long prison sentences.

Banning the private ownership of guns, like prohibition, would never work.

Dumb assistant principal, dumb cops, dumb prosecutor, dumb judge, dumb psychiatrist. I hope the family finds a smart lawyer.

and I could envision a naive person confusing the two but not someone who's ever seen both leaves.

that's palmately compound and has teeth and "see" a marijuana leaf. I have a japanese maple tree with narrow leaflets, and they do superficially resemble pot leaves. So do the leaves on the cinquefoil that I have growing wild out back.

Lots of people can't tell one plant from another. I recently taught my next door neighbors how to identify poison ivy after they kept getting rashes from it. It was up under the shrubs around the lawn and the dog was getting into it. When they'd pet the dog or cuddle it, the urushiol got onto their skin. Until I told them, they had no idea what poison ivy looked like, or that it was growing in their yard, or that the dog could spread the "poison" to them on its fur.

My biggest complaint here is with the cops who must have been involved in the case. They certainly should be able to identify a marijuana leaf even if the idiot at the school couldn't.

The idiot principal may be excused because he's not expected to be a specialist in either plant identification or in drug identification. That's not really his job, but given that he works in a school, and is expected to try to prevent drug use on campus, he should make it his business to know these things.

But the cops, especially those who work drugs, surely should have known better. Cops have raided places because of Japanese maples before, though, so it's not like it's the first time this kind of mistake has been made.

Imagine sending it to the lab three times. You know they wouldn't have sent it back if the first test had come up positive. Assholes.

OT: My Norway maples' leaves look entirely different than those in that picture.

And stop being so fricking dumb authority types!

Sorry folks, but the really stupid people you see in Congress that pretend Climate Change is a hoax...run schools and even school districts. We like to assume school admins are full of smart people on the ball, yes sometimes they are. However, sometimes they are run by the worst people in America. Backwards, troll like people.

Most of the THC is in the buds. Duh.

You should try some of the shake from medical grade. Might be harsh but you're about as elevated, great for spliffs.

smoking them.

Maybe I can use them for rolling papers...

How are children learning in a setting where critical thinking is discouraged?

seriously.... hate it hate it hate it

Zero tolerance = zero judgment = zero thinking

Bottom line: Zero tolerance = authoritarianism

Ever since i was 2nd year botany student.. i had to correct so many idiots on this. Japanese Maples are truly lovely to behold.

I finally asked wtf was the problem, slightly more politely, and told "how DARE a pregnant woman wear a pot leaf pin!!!!!!11". A slow blink from me and this idiot was told it was a maple leaf, the pg woman was Canadian. A maple leaf, like on their flag. Blank look. Then, "well, how should I know that?" Maybe, just maybe because we are living surrounded by Canada in SE AK? Maybe?

How on earth did you manage to keep a straight face? What a colossal dumbass!

"ah! ah! how DARE you call yourself a nurse!". My reply which shut her up was "you should see my thighs". I had little patience with an untrained unlicensed "medical assistant" calling herself a nurse to patients on the phone and talked with the clinic admin who said "she's working as his nurse, what's the problem?" If you really don't see the problem with someone claiming they are educated, trained, tested, licensed as a nurse without any of those things, here is 1 word. Liability.

She didn't last much longer. She was just not very bright but thought she was Queen Shit.

She never tried to cover it up, and I have no idea to what extant she found it embarrassing. I learned maybe twenty minutes into the job that it was a birthmark, and that it would be rudely insensitive to say anything to her. Which was a good lesson to me not to make assumptions about too many things.

had no idea what sort of life pin the woman was wearing?

Supporting sane legalization of marijuana does not mean the woman was actually smoking it while pregnant.

It's criminal.

And if you're really an administrator and not all that well-versed with pot, it's not a difficult mistake.

Except there are no mistakes. It's all malice and ill-will, and making people pay as much as possible for mistakes.


We lament zero-tolerance. Then exult in zero-tolerance.

Well, at least we've gotten rid of that nasty need for introspection and self-examination, resolved our empathy and nuance self-delusions, and gotten over our fear of hypocrisy.

I'd be able to tell the difference most of the time, but not because I've ever actually seen (to my knowledge) a pot leaf. But because I've been around a few different varieties of Japanese maples and even okra. (I will say I suspect some neighborhood kids jumped the fence to steal leaves from my okra last year and smoke them. The fools. Then again, many of the teens were so proudly members of the public school community that they not only didn't recognize strawberry plants but also denied that strawberries grew on plants. Idjits.)

Really, the leaf is special but the buds are even better

Three tests?

Nobody has a nose?

I hope they have already filed a lawsuit. This is beyond belief. I have an 11-year-old great-grandson who has probably never heard of marijuana and would be devastated if he were to be arrested for anything, let alone this charge.

Look out kindergartners. That sand pile may be your demise.

A whole year suspension? A little over the top ya think.

Would he have been suspended for a year for a pack of cigarettes? A bottle of beer? Damn ass backwards hysteria.

Not that I'm condoning underage use of any of these substances, but unless he had a pound and was dealing I find this reaction way over the top. Wouldn't the sensible thing to do in this case is determine the validity of said leaf and figure out where he got it from if it really was mj, and then go from there. Here in my part of Oregon that would involve the school officials, social services and LE with the goal of helping the kid. Suspending him for a year and the correctional school he ends up in could really affect his chances of succeeding.

that can measure stupidity on this scale.

And we can measure the size of the universe with reasonable certitude.

into doing right by that kid. This is an outrage!

how we feel.

Don't they realize that every absurdity is another erosion in the voters' confidence in public schools?

Then they act surprised when their cushy, overpaid jobs are replaced by charter school businessmen.

That much should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer.

"The 11-year-old boy at the center of a federal lawsuit that made national headlines is back in a public school in Bedford County. As a result, the Bedford County School Board and Bedford County Public Schools have been removed from the lawsuit, but three faculty members are still defendants.

MORE FROM WDBJ7.COM
WDBJ7.com
Mediation could start weeks from now in Bedford Schools marijuana lawsuit
The lawsuit centers on the year-long suspension of a student at Bedford Middle School after a school resource officer found a purported marijuana leaf in his backpack. Even though it field-tested negative, the student was charged with possession of the drug. That charge was eventually dismissed. The student and his family say he wasn't given due process before the suspension early in the school year and home schooling the child has been expensive. The parents and the student sued the school system and three faculty members for the cost of counseling and homeschooling for the child."

The family is white.

As for mediation, if I were the parents I would say no and demand it go before a jury trial. Make each of the faculty members testify under oath. If they lie they should lose their job. Fuck the faculty members, fuck the school, and fuck the school district. They took drastic measures before even investigating what happened.

It's not easy living around such stupid people but geographically this is such a beautiful and inexpensive area. We've been in the area for a decade.

I never heard this story locally and my politically plugged in friends had't either.

I hope both end up with huge civil settlements.

There is no shortage of stupid here. It's redder than red, with people voting against their own interests. If the candidate is against gays, for God and guns, that's all you need to know.

Our youngest daughter got a great education in 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, but we'd never have moved here if she hadn't had a stellar education from her previous school districts - we knew she'd do great and she did.

This poor kid and his parents have been through the wringer.

a lot of people clinging to stupid as if it were some sort of black hole that prevents them from thinking. The long view is that we are still overcoming the grip of the monotheistic fundamentalist witch-burning illiterate culture that dominated Western "civilization" for a thousand years plus.

Do we need to start storming talk radio stations, occupying Fox News studios, or what?
How do we bring down the walls of darkness and inaugurate the enlightenment?

We are on the cusp of becoming civilized again, in the post-Roman Empire sense, but we have yet to recover from keeping all the slaves in the dark.

The Human race has some interesting unrealized potential.

Damn, that sounds like fun.

Very nice artwork, along with a description of the tree & the name. Someone complained to HR that he had a pot leaf & he was told to take the notebook home. When he told them it was a Japanese maple leaf, not a pot leaf, they said it didn't matter. It's what it looked like.

Good fucking grief! We are a nation of uptight morans!

(sarcasm)

right now with an attorney. And I'd hope to find a vastly better school for my kid than this one.

So the kid picks a pot leaf off of Uncle Dingo's plant and takes it to school to show off to the other kids.

Big deal.

You give the kid an essay on how drugs are bad, and you laugh it off.

If an 11-year-old is hardly even old enough to stand trial for murder AS A JUVENILE, why would he be old enough to be punished like a much older kid who brought a pot leaf to school?

Suspend an 11-year-old for a year, and he's not going to remember what it was for by Halloween.

Kids are also being suspended for bringing aspirin or nose drops to school. This kind of stupidity is occurring nationwide because school administrators want only hard and fast rules that they can administer without thinking. They don't want to get into situation where they actually have to use common sense in individual situations. Local voters should throw out school board members that allow this kind of stupidly to continue in their schools unchecked. If we can't expect the principle of a gifted program to make common sense decisions, he should be shown the door.

before imposing the penalty? Something sounds off here.

for his interest in science?