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Florida Teen Expelled and Arrested For Science Experiment
First time accepted submitter ruhri writes "A 16 year-old girl in Florida not only has been expelled from her high school but also is being charged as an adult with a felony after replicating the classic toilet-bowl cleaner and aluminum foil experiment. This has quite a number of scientists and science educators up in arms. The fact that she's African American and that the same assistant state attorney has decided not to charge a white teenager who accidentally killed his brother with a BB gun has some thinking whether this is a case of doing science while black."
South of the Mason-Dixon line. Need we know more?
If only the poor young lady had been doing a forensic chemistry experiment to validate the Shroud of Turin or the remains of Noah's Ark, I'm quite sure she wouldn't have run afoul of the law there.
There we go, playing the race card. Sigh. What does a kid with a BB gun have to do with this? Nothing, but it "creates the narrative". We all know what the narrative is, race race race. It's always first on the list and it always gets shoehorned in even if it doesn't belong. Everyone sees it but due to the mainstream media's gatekeeper role nobody can talk back. This is why Americans distrust the media, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I thought people involved in educational process are better than this...
Lets not attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.
And in this case, I hardly believe its about one being black,although it could play a part, it beingthe us,it seems more a thing about one being gun related and the other science related.
We all know what many americans hate most.
I don't think that this is race related, I think that the punishment is so harsh because everyone is scared of improvised explosive devices after Boston. When I first heard the story it was reported as "An Acid Bomb was Set Off At a Local High School".
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Where is cowboy neal when you need him :'(
Jails for the mind. NCLB has ruined education, by far GWB worst piece of policy. That coupled with "zero tolerance" which equates to "no thinking by staff" we are ruining a generation of kids. Teaching to tests, which NCLB does prohibits this kind of "thinking" to experiment.
I'd have a rap sheet a mile long if I was in school and I only graduated 14y ago. And I didn't even do anything bad!
School authorities in Florida have always been on the retarded side of the coin. Suspending or expelling kids for this kind of thing is really disgusting. God it is depressing. I went to school in Florida and was lucky that most of my teachers were good at their jobs. But those above teachers in the school food chain are some of the worst creeps you could ever imagine.
You can do the same explosion using baking soda and vinegar.
The only reason there is an explosion is the closed container.
This is the same state who threw out votes from African Americans, clearly Florida is just a Racist state. I think the state motto should be "White is right".
America is a bunch of pussies now. Had something like this happened in the 50s-80s..maybe even the 90s, the result would have been a stern reprimand and at most a couple days suspension. This "Daddy" syndrome needs to end. I doubt even the French would freak out the way the school and DA have.
So now anything that blows up is automatically a weapon? I hope their school buses don't run on gas or diesel engines, then they would have to charge all the bus drivers with bringing weapons to school every day.
This is almost as stupid as suspending a 7 year old for having a pastry that's vaguely gun-shaped.
http://www.loweringthebar.net/2013/03/pastry-gun.html
Reading the police report suddenly turns into "friend told this girl to mix the two and see what happens". "friend" then runs off. This wasn't a science fair, or a science experiment. it was "hey yall watch this" in a school. No article mentions it was at an actual science fair, she just inserted the word into her statement.
When I was in school, it was basically a full time job for many of us boys to figure out ways to make ever larger and more dramatic explosions happen. We used to fill trash bags full of methane from the lab, seal them with tape, then release them with a lit fuse and watch this huge fireball in the sky (I stopped before the principal took notice, so I didn't get caught:). I mean, kids just do stuff like that.
The difference today is the zero-tolerance rules in many public schools where even a little 6-year-old boy making a shape of a gun with his hand and going "bang!" at another kid is grounds for suspension.
As usual, bureaucracy gets it wrong. That girl should be reinstated and an apology should be issued, otherwise she'll be barred for life from many professions (albeit, as a minor theoretically her record is sealed, but in reality she's screwed).
And racism? That was just an extra little tidbit the OP added to spice things up. Ridiculous.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Was this really a science experiment? She was mixing household chemicals in a plastic bottle on school property. It had nothing to do with her science class. It's more likely she got this stuff out of the janitor's closet or something like that. It sounds more like a kid being stupid rather than one experimenting.
Not that I agree with the penalty in any way. Detention or suspension would be ok here since no real harm came from it. It doesn't merit police involvement, or comparison to an accidental shooting.
You seriously need to get rid of this stupidity, lest you some day become irrelevant.
Regards
Only an idiot could call a plastic bottle Drano bomb a "destructive device". They normally produce no fragments and the blast power is a little over a big firecracker.
Zero Tolerance means zero intelligence. Circumstances are always different. Thanks to our wonderful school and legal systems, there's less discretion. The bad and good part of discretion is bias. A straight-A good kid will be given the benefit of a doubt over a kid that has a reputation for being a troublemaker. On one hand, it's possibly a good rule of thumb... but it can lead to folks getting railroaded unfairly.
The "solution" then is to treat EVERYONE badly. I'm not that old, and my school had a policy of "both kids in a fight get punished." Didn't matter if you got jumped for being a geek with pacifist philosophy. OTOH, it was a learning experience about bureaucracy, government and pacifism. I dumped the pacifism, and the next kid that jumped me, I earned every ounce of my administrative punishment because I had no incentive NOT to do so. Zero tolerance and "everyone involved is equally guilty" is bunk, and a bad idea.
I clicked the link already angry at what I expected to find - a story about an ignorant, probably racist bureaucrat ruining a smart kid's life for no good reason.
But as someone who (as a kid) did more than my share of disruptive, loud, messy things, I can tell you that even before 9/11 and IEDs and "zero tolerance" doing this in a school bathroom would have resulted in punishment. This wasn't a classroom experiment - no teachers were aware of it - and, like it or not, Drano (or an equivalent toilet cleaner) is a pretty harsh chemical.
This won't be a popular post, but I don't think the story lives up to the headline.
What if her "science experiment" involved a pressure cooker?
This is simply stupid. And lazy on the part of the school, staff, and teachers.
Is there a reason they can't just talk to the girl and redirect her energy and curiosity to something beneficial?
An adult felony charge (not a conviction) will never come off of her record and always interfere with her ability
to seek the type of employment she may want in her future.
IMHO, her parents should push for a jury trial because I can pretty much guarantee the prosecutor(s) will push for
a guilty plea with probation and "threaten" her or her parents with jail time if they don't agree. Now, the jury should
find that the facts satisfy the legal requirements for a guilty verdict, but nullify the law in this case. This is the only
country in the world that has this legal system, but jurors are often intimidated as to their rights and responsibilities
under the law by the very judges that serve them (yes, in the U.S. the judge "works" for the jurors, but judges often
forget this minor fact).
If it we possible, the jurors should indict the arresting officer for terroristic threats against the girl, but that's wishful
thinking on my part...
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/05/florida_school_responds_to_cri.php?page=2
Sounds like the science teacher sold her our by claiming "NO WAY WAS WILMOT'S ACTIONS PART OF ANY CLASS WORK."
I still think criminal charges are overkill but expulsion from school for a few days is warranted. Unless it turns out the science teacher was just CYA and this really was some science project due in a few weeks and she wanted to show it off to friends first.
If this is the case, then schools are going to have to stop teaching chemistry all together. Let's just cover everyone in a blanket of ignorance under the guise of safety and control by our wonderful government.
The BB gun incident seems to have happened off of school property. If she did this at home the charges applied (explosives, dangerous toys, blah blah blah at school) would not have been applicable. The government's standard response with stuff involving schools and "danger" is "kill it with fire" to appease the parents who might freak out if something HAD happened and the few squeaky wheels who are such bed-wetters that they'll call into question the integrity, intelligence, etc. of people who "let this happen."
What next baking soda and vinegar gets a 6 months in juvie. Hydrogen filled balloons at least a year. Sodium your going down for life man. Please fire whatever school staff made this decision they are obviously incapable of rational thought, they claim it's a zero tolerance bs when the zero tolerance has a specific exception for scientific experiments.
I do really hope the judge dismisses the case with cause and send a nasty gram to the state bar.
No sir I dont like it.
Not many are saying that punishment isn't warranted. The problem is that the police were involved at all, that's the ridiculous part. Frankly if the police and DA have time to get involved in this sort of thing layoffs are long past due in this district.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
What experiment is this?
Sorry, I thought I had a reasonable science background in high school, but that was apparently too long ago for me to remember this experiment.
Can someone provide details? I'm a little cautious in having it show up in my Google history at the moment.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
...tells me that it is massively unlikely this was intellectual curiosity. Some kid thought it would be funny to make a huge bang at a place where huge bangs are known to cause massive administrative overreaction.
When I first read this, I thought it was horrible. One of the articles linked in the story here called it a botched experiment. What kind of loony racist throws the book so hard at a kid who messed up a project? Then I went looking for the "experiment" and learned there was pretty much definitely nothing botched about this. Youtube is full of works bombs, which is apparently what these are called. A popular chemistry blog I stumbled into explains these are actually illegal to make. And I really don't see what else you could do with these components.
Now, this kid certainly doesn't deserve to be tried as an adult for multiple felonies just because they made a total dipshit choice that hurt nobody. But what's going on here is just usual-business prosecutorial excess, not racism. Ruining dumb high school kids' lives is practically what these fuckers live for lately, regardless of skin tone.
Its exactly that kind of stuff that got me into chemistry in the first place
SURELY NOT!!!!!
No one is saying it's OK. We're saying it's not a felony. Make the kid clean up the mess and suspend her for a week. Problem solved.
Excessive criminalization is a much bigger threat to us all than kids with drano bombs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...does someone accidentally killing someone with a BB gun, and someone dissolving Al in TBC have to do with each other? I haven't read the article, and I won't read the article, but come on. I don't even care about the merits of each case. Slashdot, you're treading on thin ice.
To be honest I think she deserves to be expelled and while felony charge might be a bit harsh, it damned well should be illegal and carry punishment. Those bombs are fucking dangerous - when they go off, you have acid going in all directions - yeah, you might not kill people, but it will take your eyes out...
Sure, put it in the headlines, now people don't have to go out of their way to learn this shit, streisand effect, way to go assholes.
How and where can I contribute to the legal costs for the family of this student? I want them to hire the best advocates money can provide, I want to see that judge humiliated for attempting to destroy the future of a curious student who made a mistake leading to an incident where no harm was either done or intended.
I see no mention in the article about a bathroom; it was outside near a gazebo and she stated that she was doing a science fair experiment.
-SaNo
Once again, proof as to why Florida is the only state that has it's own Fark tag or needs it.
My kid was showing me last night how to squeeze an empty water bottle hard enough to make the cap pop off. It made a good pop and sent the cap across the kitchen. If he does that at his school will he be arrested and charged with detonating an explosive device? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
No. Apparently they have charged rape suspects as Juveniles in that area, but a good student who hurt nobody will be tried as an adult??? It will never drop off her record. Freaking insane.
There is a petition to get the charges dropped and it has well over 10k signatures already:
http://www.change.org/petitions/the-bartow-police-and-bartow-high-school-drop-charges-against-kiera-wilmot?share_id=dFwlXuyxHk&utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
It would have resulted in a *proportional* punishment. As a teenager I improvised something far more spectacular and got caught (it was kind of obvious who did it - enormous bang followed by four teenagers running away from the sound source just as a teacher left the chemistry block). I was shouted at and IIRC got a detention for it. No suspension. No life-ruining felony prosecution.
What this girl is getting is grossly and obscenely disproportionate. Even if she's acquitted of felony charges, it is grossly unjust that she was ever dragged through the court system for this.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We don't let our citizens learn about science, so we need more H1Bs please...
Hell, 40-something years ago, one of my *required* lab experiements involved introducing a lit match into a testtube full of hydrogen. That resulted in a loud bang (and nearly in wet pants). The rest of the class was not yet on that experiemnt, so nobody was expecting it, but there was not even a question from the teacher.
Sure, this may have been unauthorized, but the worst it merits is some form of suspension
It seems like it's about every other week that I read about a girl in Florida that blows up a soda bottle in school, a boy in Kentucky shooting his sister,
or (in the news earlier today) a farmer in the Philippines accidentally killing his daughter while cleaning his shotgun, then turning the gun on himself.
Stupidity knows no borders or colors, and we're all sadly affected with it.
What exactly is the non-racist explanation for that lack of proportionality?
Think "war on drugs" logic. This chemistry experiment ended up producing what is technically an improvised explosive device, and IEDs like this are a "gateway drug" of sorts to IEDs that terrorists have used within the past month to kill or maim dozens of people.
Look, this was not a science experiment or a science fair entry; this was some dimbulb mixing chemicals together to see what would happen. Charging her with a felony only compounds the stupidity. From the story, she mixed the chemicals near a school gazebo, which then blew up or banged or something drawing the attention of the school's security. Dumb to do, but then she decides to try playing the "it was for science" card, the security decides to charge her with a felony (wrong as well), and now she is playing the race card ("I would not have been charged if I were white".).
Dumb, dumb, dumb
I hope their chemistry teacher has never put a chunk of potassium in water as a demonstration to students, otherwise they might be "discharging an explosive device" and "making a poor choice". Give me a break. The only thing this girl did wrong was fail to get permission for her experiment, but frankly, everyone should have to get permission for the science project they do so that an instructor can verify that they are doing something challenging enough and safe enough to qualify as a high school science project.
That said, I don't know if this is race-related so much as terrible schooling (which unfortunately correlates to race through economic conditions). Combine that with a DA who can't apply common sense and this girl's life is ruined.
So, I take it, since this was at school, she had adult supervision, and she'd confirmed the safety precautions were carried out.
So why did the supervisor not say anything? I mean there was one, right? She wasn't just blowing shit up for kicks?
one year!
she stated that she was doing a science fair experiment
And you believe that claim because...?
(Not that I agree with the school & police reaction, but that doesn't mean I'm going to suspend criticism on either side)
I was far from a bad teenager. I loved science though and if it went bang that was all the better. Draino and aluminium foil? Jesus. I made fertiliser bombs. I synthesised Nitrogen triiodide and all manner of other fun compounds.
One bonfire night I once had a visit from the police due to my homemade titanium salutes. They were amused and told me not to blow my hands off. These days I'd go to jail for a million years.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Does it suprise anyone? We are increasingly becoming a more paranoid and demanding society. In this age of super paranoia and political gridlock, the easiest way to make it look like you are doing something about real problems, (IE: Gun control, gang violence, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure) is to take it out on people that have no ability to fight back. We are afraid of bombs after Boston, so an innocent experiment from a youth is seen as a potential terrorist in training. We are afraid of school violence, so we post a police officer in the school who manhandles this student. We are afraid of urban youth, so we throw them in jail at the first reason we are given. We fear failing grades, so the fact she was experimenting on her own is seen as a sign that she was wasting time instead of a sign that she has a vest for learning.
Of course this isn't surprising, or shocking. This is exactly what we have designed schools to be over the last 15 years.
Highschool students can't vote, so it okay for us to subject them to ridiculous crap. Zero Tolerance sounds great on paper, but in effect it criminalizes youthful behavior, and in this case educational curiosity. I am sure that if this student was not in an urban highschool, and that her pigmentation was a different hue, this would have been written off as a prank at worst, or an experiment gone wrong at best. The school's reasoning for expulsion being that this event caused undue distraction is another example. No Child Left Behind has turned schools into prisons for the mind. The fact this event distracted students was seen as more of an educational problem than the fact this poor student will be stripped of her chance at a real education by being summarily expelled. Because what the school cares about is less the wellbeing of a single child and more the well being of a test average. God forbid the students are not in their seats, eyes forward for the entire duration of class. Because as we all know, major distracting events are never likely to happen in the real world, and of course we should not discuss them.
Yes, you have nailed it. It's not racism, it's Zero Tolerance. It provides a theoretical way for the schools to enforce discipline and standards on all the students by setting out a policy and making no exceptions to it. The only problem is that life doesn't work that way. For example, it's one thing to shoot your ex-spouse just because they made you angry and something else entirely for a policeman to shoot an armed robber at a bank who is holding hostages and threatening them. Zero Tolerance in those circumstances would require the policeman to be charged with a crime because he "killed someone". To me, this is just symptomatic of how American schools have failed and continue to fail. Zero Tolerance is the answer for everything. Just this week, a principal in (I think) Kansas City had to apologize because he refused to allow a student's solder brother to escort her to her prom because he was "too old" (he was 21). They had a rule that established a cutoff age for non-student escorts, and he was above that age. The only problem was this decision went viral and thousands of people gave the principal and the school district hell about this for "dishonoring an American hero" and the superintendent of the district made the principal apologize to the soldier and the policy will be changed to allow exceptions. But that's how America has decided to handle everything in the schools - These are our rules and they can't be changed. No exceptions. Oh your kids need to learn? Sorry, our business is enforcing the rules.
I once mixed ammonia and bleach on school property as an undergrad, just to see what would happen. That's called curiosity.
To say it wasn't a science experiment because it "had nothing to do with my science class" is to undercut what education is all about - making you curious enough to try stuff on your own.
I've seen this news elsewhere and Slashdot was the first place to call it a science experiment. I guess it could be, in the same sense as a Diet Coke & Mentos experiment or an "effects of flour on your best friend's head" experiment.
What's being done to her is completely ridiculous and she deserves nothing more than maybe a nasty look and a mild talking-to, but let's not stoop to yellow geek journalism
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My now 17 year old Son was expelled from high school two years ago for... get this... popping a regular old helium balloon. He was charged with Disorderly Conduct (the catch-all "when we want to charge you with something" summary crime in Pennsylvania) but we managed to get that dismissed at the Magisterial District Court after about $15,000 in legal fees, most of which was spent trying to obtain school surveillance video showing that the balloon popped when he leaned up against a wall, pinching the balloon between his backpack and the wall, causing it to pop.
We've home-schooled him since then. It's truly amazing how absolutely brain-dead our government has become. It really does destroy everything it touches, including the education system.
As the saying goes, "zero tolerance = zero common sense"
I thought it read "asshat state attorney."
Not an incorrect interpretation, it turns out.
"Florida Teen", is that " Florida Man"'s sidekick?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This won't be a popular post
Damn straight. You can't just come in here waggling the truth in our faces like Jack the Biscuit. Where do you people get off?!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So, sorry kids. Don't try any extracurricular science projects on school grounds, especially if they could result in anything resembling an explosion.
It sounds like the article is trying to be sarcastic, but that seems like perfectly reasonable advice to me.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Punishment yes.
Suspension yes.
Expulsion? maybe... if there's an existing history to think about.
Felony charges? No. Just... no.
On the other hand I think she deserves a scholarship, and that the case for giving her a scholarship increases the longer and more extreme the authorities hound her. I hope there are Universities out there farsighted enough to recognize that the lynch mob (the one you've regrettably decided to join) is exceptionally damaging to the cause of education and learning, especially when on the surface at least it does appear to have the hallmarks of racial and sexual discrimination.
If you get your way, the only way to undo the damage is for others to come forward and pro-actively reward her for her actions.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Proportionality. That's what the kid with a BB gun has to do with this. An accidental death caused by a white boy gets no punishment. An accidental chemical hazard that kills no one, but is caused by a black girl gets charged with felonies. That's disproportionate. What exactly is the non-racist explanation for that lack of proportionality?
See, this is the way I saw it.
The white boy accidentally shot his brother with a gun - whether or not it's a BB gun is irrelevant. It's a GUN.
The black girl built a BOMB - whether or not is was just a glorified firecracker is irrelevant.
You see there are two HUGE things going on here - no three.
1. We just had a terrorist attack with bombs in Boston.
2. The GUN lobby is extremely powerful - especially in the South - where I live.
3. Add in an ADA with POLITICAL ASPIRATIONS and an over reactive ignorant public and you got this horseshit.
Race?!? I doubt it.
Believe it or not, as a Damn Yankee (Northerner in the South who never left), racism isn't what many of you think it is down here. Yeah, there are some very backward areas and people who are stuck in the 1950s, but things have come a long way - further than what I still experience up in the "liberal" North.
I had dinner with a H.S. teacher recently and I was amazed at how things have changed. For example, it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT. Even a basic fistfight with no weapons and no serious injuries. "Ridiculous" is right.
It's sodium hydroxide which is basic, not acidic. Yes, it turns the fats in your body to soap, and is a very effective way to melt down a body, but the process is very slow.
As someone who has had an experiment of this very nature go haywire in my face I know from first hand experience that it's very unpleasant. But...please don't try to make out that the solution will melt someone's skin off in front of their eyes, the victim will have plenty and plenty of time to get water on the burn to dilute and remove the hydroxide. In the eyes won't be some easy, but I would be highly surprised if someone lost their vision provided they reacted in any kind of normal way: "holy shit, my eyes sting like living hell, I'd better wash them out with water *immediately*!!!"
Yes, an explosion in the face won't be good, but again, for a hydrogen explosion like this to do any real damage to life or property it has to be in a confined space and produce a lot of gas. In the open air you would have to make a monsterous amount of gas, and even then we'd be talking about a mild concussion and possibly ear-drum damage.
Anyway, the point of my response is to try and provide some rational perspective of the true *danger* and *risk* involved here.
I bet it would be lye going in all directions, but the net result is the same... But if this rates as a felony, then I'm probably on the terrorrist list of the USA...
"Science" has a precise meaning; it's not something you can just bandy around whenever the hell you feel like it. Mixing two chemicals together isn't "science", it's "mixing two chemicals together". And if the results happen to break the law, then you just might get what's coming to you.
Zero tolerance == guilty until proven innocent.
You know, the way our legal system works now.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
How the small, harmless chemical explosion was produced is what nobody is arguing about. Here's a nickel, buy yourself a clue.
He he: CAPTCHA - "complied"
He he he: Second CAPTCHA - "benign"
Oh that's right....NOTHING.
Why is it people feel the need to force race into everything they possibly can. They will hammer that square peg into the round hole even if it requires sanding down the square peg and then smashing it with a sledgehammer.
This is as stupid as that white guy what was it a year or so ago that had this big huge trial allover the news because he killed a black guy in self defense. Now white guys kill white guys all the time, black guys kill black guys all the time, black guys kill white guys also. But, no one cares at all until a white guy kills a black guy then all of the sudden everyone explodes in racist hysteria.
Whoever started this discussion you need to grow the hell up and realize that there are white people, and there are black people. They both do good and bad and stupid stuff but that doesn't mean everytime their paths cross (or in this case when their paths do not cross at all) it doesn't mean racism is related.
You know who causes racism? You do. People just like you who I will assume is white because white people anymore seem to yell racism more than anyone else. If you would simply stop trying to see race in everything, if you would just shut up about it and stop talking about racism it would go away much faster. The more people bring it up, the more it gets attention the longer we will have it.
http://www.bartowhighschool.com/Contact%20Us.html
ronald.pritchard@polk-fl.net
The above is a comment section of their website, and the email of the principal.
I suggest everyone upset by this let them know exactly how we feel.
The principal seemed to understand what happened and didn't think it was a big deal. From the articles posted it seems to me that it was the School Resource Officer that made the call to turn this into a criminal matter, which makes sense as these officers face the same pressure as other LEOs to make arrests and "justify their existence".
This is why cops need not be stationed in schools.
1. We have a teen mixing chemicals that she admitted she had no idea what they would do.
2.She's doing this in the schoolyard, not in a lab or classroom, and not under the direction of any teacher.
3.Some friend was guiding her into mixing the chemicals.
Ok, so it was a prank. I understand. A teenager doesn't always make the best decisions. We have all likely done pranks before.
But the difference is, in this day and age, and after recent bombings, mixing random things together at the advice of your friend is really really stupid. She had no idea what would happen and admitted as much. That's how you get people "innocently" making real bombs and killing real people. And I think that's why there was such a harsh response.
I wish I could say race played no part, but I think it did. This is a very conservative county, a real backwater.
Those bombs are fucking dangerous - when they go off, you have acid going in all directions - yeah, you might not kill people, but it will take your eyes out...
To be pedantic you have boiling concentrated caustic soda (also known as lye or caustic soda), a very strong and dangerous alkali, splashing all over the place. The vigorous reaction with aluminium gives off hydrogen as well as heating the solution to boiling point. When I was at school that sort of thing would have got you a suspension, but I think that with today's safety culture an expulsion could be on the cards.
"Zero Tolerance means zero intelligence."
this
I am a chemistry teacher, and I can tell you definitively that NO chemistry teacher worth their salt would allow this "experiment". Anything that explodes is not good science, it's just a nasty burn or cut (or worse) waiting to happen.
What's more, this "experiment" was done in a bathroom.
If you want to do science, clear it with your teacher. There are ways of doing "explosive" chemistry that are safe enough for students to do but still exciting enough to get them interested.
Expulsion is certainly appropriate. Felony charges? That seems a bit much (no one was hurt), but misdemeanors? Absolutely. Someone could easily have been blinded or seriously hurt by this.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
BB guns will also take your eyes out.
According to the incident report, "Mr. Durham advised Kiera told him she was conducting a science fair experiment... Wilmot advised she did not know what would happen when she mixed the ingredients. Wilmot advised she thought it would just cause some smoke." There were no injuries, no damage, not even clear intent. Where is the felony crime here? It's only in the mind of Assistant State Attorney Tammy Glotfelty.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
The spirit of 1776 died by 1782, when the merchants started stepping up enforcement of all that 'backowed' debt in hard currency because their foreign trade partners wouldn't accept barter (which the US was at the time principally running on.) The Shay and Whiskey rebellions are good examples of this, and how even strong complaints won't make a difference. Either rebel or shut up and take it, but don't claim our modern life isn't imitating historical accuracy :)
This wasn't a "science experiment". It was a fucked up little girl randomly mixing cleaning chemicals in the bathroom to see what would happen. Bringing up race is just some misleading vividness used as a red herring. I swear I hope the both of you lose a loved one to some idiot like this girl and her "experiment".
So she's a black teenager... So what? As others have mentioned, other than adding the race card which seems to be obligatory to any story involving schools anymore, what bearing does it have on the REAL story? The issue is in the "what" and "where". The core FACTS that the article stated, 16yo female created a hydrogen soda bottle bomb on school property without sanction by individual science teacher, nor administration. PERIOD. She built a potentially dangerous device on school grounds completely on her own. Her own lack of knowledge in understanding exactly what it would do is her own fault. To use a bad cliche', "she did the crime, she has to do the time." That being said, does it merit expulsion? And/or felony procedings? As much as I understand (not like) the basic concept of Zero-Tolerance, I do agree that it has one way too far. If this was a demonstrated malicious act, then haul the kid off to court. Her crime was ignorance of basic science. Given that it was potentially dangerous, suspend her for a couple weeks and send her to Juvenille detention if you have to, but the actual response by school and law enforcement authorities is ridiculous.
I had dinner with a H.S. teacher recently and I was amazed at how things have changed. For example, it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT. Even a basic fistfight with no weapons and no serious injuries. "Ridiculous" is right.
How does a kid being bullied not count as assault? Certainly when I was at school there was a lot of bullying going on and the school simply didn't care (even when people inevitably ended up injured). Whilst I'll agree that the first port of call should be for it to be handled internally in the school, if that doesn't work shouldn't the police be involved if only for the protection of the kids on the receiving end?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
1) this wasn't a science fair experiment. The science teacher said this had nothing to do with classwork - she was just screwing around.
2) the 'draino bomb' hardly makes "a little pop, and a little smoke" (nice job of displaying one's bias on the part of the reporter, though). Any sort of pressure in a sealed vessel can explode with nasty consequences, and drain-o is no cheery substance to be splashed with either. As a "smart" student, she should have understood that too.
And you know what, it's not a binary thing:
She WAS an idiot AND The school administration are dicks for expelling her.
BOTH can be simultaneously true.
(That said, I'm really f*cking sick of school admins hiding behind the 'no tolerance' nonsense. You morons are paid well to MAKE DECISIONS, it doesn't take any brainpower to follow a chain of if-then statements blindly.)
I certainly see justification for suspension for a few days, but not expulsion.
If she's that good a student as portrayed, suspension will be enough.
-Styopa
You're the one who decide to call them black kid and white kid. Up until then it was just a couple of kids till you decided to divide them up and label them based on skin color.
Are you really so desperate to find racism and yell it in the streets you will take 2 completely unrelated stories just so you can mash them together and yell racism?
You do know that being a reverse racist is still a racist right?
So how about instead of saying "white or black" you say kid, man, girl, baby, woman and so on. Or better yet, call people by their names. How is that for a novel idea?
I think you should listen to mr morgan freeman http://youtu.be/z2d2SzRZvsQ
Oh and for the record, she isn't African American. She is American because she was born in America. African American would be someone born in Africa who becomes a US citizen. Im white but I don't call myself Irish American and most white people don't call themselves European American do we? Not to mention Africa has oh a couple million white people who has lived there for a thousand years and what about the indian people who live there? Do you call them African americans also? Or what if someones family comes from Germany and china do you call them German Chinese Americans? You see where Im going with this I hope. Youre giving black people special and unique treatment and sensitivity based purely on the color of their skin that you do not extend to anyone else so that makes you a racist. You do realize that correct?
While many fellow /.ers enjoy debating race, gun, IED, I would like to stress a couple of facts:
1) Can someone bring guns to school and practice shooting?
Even it is a scientific experiment, there must be certain conditions to limit the scope / location / time that the experiment should be performed.
2) BB Gun accident happened in their home.
http://www.wtsp.com/news/local/article/304429/8/POLK-10-year-old-shot-in-the-head-with-BB-gun
Their mom was preparing food.
Moderators, could you please add information to your original post? It will help discussion.
^(oo)^pig~
Because we all know that's what they want....
What is worse is that this article [http://www.theledger.com/article/20130423/NEWS/304235005] has published the girl's full name and complete address. Despite this apparently being legal to do in Florida, the reporter is being reckless. It adds no value to the article and does endanger this minor and her family.
Here is the writer's email if you wish make any suggestions.
suzie.schottelkotte@theledger.com
Except I hope she's alive after this.
The problem is that "you didn't suspend/expel/charge A for doing this so you can't charge B" is the main defense in school misbehavior cases, so letting someone getting away with making a bomb "because no one was hurt" isn't going to fly. This is not a case of some first grader having unauthorized scissors, this is someone getting lucky that no one was seriously hurt. It was done on school property, while kids were present, so they can't sweep it under the rug. Now, the felony charge is a different matter, but again, the question is are they going to try to make it stick? Or is it just an opening salvo in pleading it to a misdemeanor, to be taken off the record after graduation? I wait for the end of the story before coming to a judgement there.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
are wrecking our country. For Christ sake, the right response to this young woman's interest in science would have been to sit her down with a competent sci/chem teacher to review what she did, why it went boom, and show her how to do it right next time. But no, the local idiots decided she's a Unabomber in the making, and have trashed her data trail for all time. One more bright, creative mind squashed.
a few hundred years ago you could still be executed for science.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Lets suppose for the sake of argument that I would blame the teachers if this child had blown herself up. Does it follow from that that the only reasonable response is to charge this child with felonies?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Zero-tolerance policies are a reaction to poor judgement. It is the same as the same as strict sentencing laws in some criminal courts.
The public had lost faith in the ability of school officials to make good judgements about weapons, explosives, and other behaviors.
Strict policies are heavy handed and will cause some folks to be over punished and others to be under punished. At the end of the day, however, strict policies are clearly documented, applied consistently, and not subject to the whims of the school officials.
The alternative to strict policies has always been, let the school decide on a case by case basis. This has resulted certain children (star athletes, politically connected children, kids the principal likes for whatever reason, etc.), committing outrageous acts without so much as a slap on the wrist.
Admittedly, you could have a strict policy that is not necessarily zero-tolerance, but as soon as you say: setting off an explosion on school grounds sometimes results in expulsion, you make the decision subject to the judgement of school officials. And voters do not trust school officials' judgement.
They really have toned down science in schools if this sort of thing gets you in trouble. My Chemistry teacher sent me home with a soda bottle of liquid nitrogen. Granted, none of it made it home, because he knew how far I had to walk and how fast it would evaporate, but the point remains.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
before having to deal with?
Better hope old age and good health doesn't run in your family!
This stupid country is producing a generation of stupid kids, cowering and fearing the government, doing only as told.
I see the same in Europe. Kids these days are compliant drones scared of offending their masters or they fight back, join gangs, and commit stupid crimes. Either way it's out of balance and far from healthy.
From my experience during high school it was exactly the opposite!
The troublemakers knew the yard duties and vice principals and as such might get detention but would skirt by under an expulsion, because they saw 'potential' in them, as a fixer upper. Whereas people who were just moderate troublemakers or had never been in trouble would get the full brunt of whatever penalty they were due. The most notable example I remember was a kid who got caught for pot possession and got expelled, whereas the kids who were bringing it daily would get a confiscation and a stern warning. (And yes I know this happened multiple times because a couple of them bragged to me about it.)
Long story short, having seen what was going on at my school in the late 90s, I have nothing but pity for the kids getting stuck in high school today.
Additionally I try and recommend to the high achiever/intelligence types they keep their heads down, act 'average' at school, and anything interesting/sciency/fun they do on their own time, hopefully with like-minded people, and consider school simply a 'get done, get out' activity.
But because she looks like a mooslim terrorist! No politician gets into trouble putting "those terrorist people" in jail after a terror attack.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
There are more and more stories like this one. It seems that US overgrown prison system has run out of suspects to jail, so they're now after anyone. Lots of Americans deny it but reality seems to be more cruel than beurocracy/stupidity/paranoia of those in power. This is for-profit cruelty instigated on US citizens by US corporations (as opposed to opressing 3-rd world citizen for profits in the past). You're being harvested by corporate prison complex installed by Bush senior in Reagan years. Sadly, this process seems to be advancing: people are being jailed for more and more trivial things and corporations operating this scheme are now profiteering on prisoners' work - which effectively converts US prisons into US prison camps and makes even more incentives to lobby/bribe officials to jail even more souls. In its way, US corporate economy found a way to compete with China prison camps or Burma prison camps - I'm sorry for if it looks cynic but it is what it is.
Around blacks, never relax.
Science no. Stupid yes.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
From North Carolina:
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=9087003
"David "Cole" Withrow is a Princeton High School honors student who was arrested Monday and charged with a felony for having a shotgun in his truck in the school parking lot."
The reporter didn't bother to dig up any past incidents involving a black teenager. She did discover that school administrators have committed the same "crime" and were never charged.
The idiocy isn't unique to Florida.
No more making the characteristic test for Hydrogen, either, I guess. Time to remove most reagents from schools, including all acids, sodium and other alkalies, sulfuric and nitric acids, toluene, glycerin, iodine, calcium carbonate, and many other potentially dangerous chemicals.
Hey kids! Welcome to Chemistry Class. Now with no chemicals!
And you thought the religious nuts where killing it.
Public schools are forced to follow a zero-tolerance policy which means that anything that violates these rules will be a federal offense. There are no exceptions which is what's ridiculous about this. You could have a swiss army knife in your car and get caught with it in the car and get arrested. There is no leeway in the US public education for these things.
For the BB gun accident, do you think the boy killed the baby on purpose? No. This was in their own home and it was done as an accident. They are already all in an enormous amount of grief that I can't even fathom and the child will have to live his entire life knowing what he did and his parents will always feel empty because a family member was short lived. Do you honestly think that jail will make this kid better? No. If anything, jail would just turn him into a hard criminal.
Now let's compare the two... They were both accidents, the first one is due to not knowing how things would react in a chem lab, which is perfectly understandable especially as a high-school student. She was a honor student and never had done anything significantly wrong before. The teacher may have not gone through safety procedures and protocols as much as they should have but she's the one that gets arrested anyways because of the zero-policy rule. As for the boy, it was in due part of negligence of the parents and a complete accident. Usually in these cases grief is more than enough of a punishment and this will last a lifetime.
Where does racism come in? First of all, different judges (do you think they are hivemind?), and second of all -- why are there people trying to make it into a race thing? It would have been the same if the kid were white or asian. It's all about the zero-tolerance policy, nothing else! It's a stupid policy but that's the reason behind the arrest.
The girl wanted to find out what happens if she mixes aluminum and drain cleaner. Her findings: under the experimental conditions (unsupervised, on school property, post-9/11), there is a fizz and a bang, a bunch of adults overreact, and you get charged with a felony. :-(
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
But as someone who (as a kid) did more than my share of disruptive, loud, messy things, I can tell you that even before 9/11 and IEDs and "zero tolerance" doing this in a school bathroom would have resulted in punishment.
This isn't about whether or not she should have been punished. Making a Drano bomb was wrong, and making it on school property was even wronger. Her actions definitely merited disciplinary action.
The issue here is the proportionality of it all. Did the punishment fit the crime? Personally, I believe that the punishment was insanely excessive. Beyond all common sense. If it were my call to make, I would have given her a 1 week school suspension, required her to write a written apology to the classmates who were in the area for putting them in danger, and required her to write a report on the safe handling of household chemicals.
Do you really think that you should today still have to answer for all of the stupid shit that you did when you were a teenager? I wouldn't want to live in such a world, either. But that's what's being done to this kid. I don't give a shit what sex she was, what color she was, or about any of the other distractions in the summary. Wrong is wrong, and that transcends everything. What's being done to this kid is wrong.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Reminds me of how I was almost charged in middle school with possession and discharging of a weapon at school for shooting a rubber band at someone. The FL school system is out of touch with reality....
Before you go off on your crusades, it may help you to actually read the articles and get your facts straight before you sharpen your pitchfork and light your torch. A 13 yo GIRL did not shoot her brother in the head with a BB gun and kill him. A 13yo BOY named Taylor Richardson held a BB gun 6 inches away from his brother's head and killed him. Hell, the proper noun (he) was even used in the summary. How could you get such a detail mixed up? Keep ranting about shit you don't know about and everyone will know you're a dumbass. And yeah, it's race. Who the fuck hasn't figured that out yet?
My immediate response to this item was to wonder whether the student in question was a constant annoyance to the teachers and administrators. The original article makes it clear that she is a model student: "Kiera Wilmot got good grades and had a perfect behavior record. She wasn't the kind of kid you'd expect to find hauled away in handcuffs and expelled from school, but that's exactly what happened after an attempt at a science project went horribly wrong."
That additional information (which really should have been in Slashdot's summary, as it was properly used in the reporter's lede) makes it clear that the student is being wronged. Whether she is being wronged as a result of racism or as a result of the inherent stupidity of zero-tolerance policies (policies from which exceptions are often made for the children of the wealthy and/or powerful) remains to be determined. Perhaps both are involved.
This is a teachable moment for the school. It is an opportunity for students and faculty together to examine the nature of fairness and the nature of bureaucracy. I hope there are some tenured faculty members at the school who are interested in making good use of the opportunity.
My own suspicion is that the administrators should be fired, but I think that way about a great many administrators.
I do think the race issue is worth discussing. As well as the gender issue.
But there's something more fundamental and less likely to stoke passions at play here:
DOING SCIENCE IS ABOUT MAKING MISTAKES. Her "punishment" should be to write a paper on what she was trying to do and why the results were not what she expected. Simple, end of story.
There should be no real punishment of any kind, much less the over the top expulsion and arrest.
The simple fact is that she should be encouraged to make mistakes, not punished for them. And the most basic problem we are dealing with is that our school systems don't understand this fact.
it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT
I have a friend w/ an autistic 6 y.o. son. One day he committed the destructive and threatening act of shaking a book case. They called the police. Understandably the police respond quickly when a school calls, but I can imagine the response of the three officers when they arrived. Apparently one of the hazards of being a police officer these days is pissing your uniform because you're laughing so hard at some of the calls you have to respond to.
I've seen overblown punishment before in many cases, for example a few weeks ago a student being expelled and then arrested for wearing an NRA shirt. When I was in school, nobody would have made a second thought about it. Really really disproportionate reaction.
That said, I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that this is race related. Is the punishment overblown? Yes. I'd say expulsion should be fine considering how dangerous it is to make an explosive that releases caustic liquids. However a criminal record is stupid. I guarantee you that each one of these cops, teachers, and prosecutors have set off a bottle rocket or made a dry ice grenade when they were a teenager, and the world didn't end.
Anyways, lesson learned, now you have to go to a new school. Is race why it is overblown though? In my opinion, not a chance.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Statistically, she's black, and thus we know where she belongs.
You can't fight statistics.
sarcasm off
I grew up in a communist country and I don't recall a kid ever getting in trouble for such a thing.
Thanks to our wonderful school and legal systems, there's less discretion
That's just the thing, prosecutors, have plenty of discretion. Maybe the judges have lost some of the discretion in punishment, but prosecutor is not limited in any way. They don't have to charge.
The "solution" then is to treat EVERYONE badly.
That seems to argument of the article -- not everyone is treated as badly as they could have. The kid who killed a brother is free to go.
Things are not unidimensional. In many countries we have had the right-wing parties demand greater state powers. All Synarchist (that means, the semantic opposite to anarchism, literally means "with a government") parties were right-wing, and mixed economics and social morals on the same bowl. Fascists are also right-wing, and they defend the state overseeing basically all aspects of societal life.
On the other hand, anarchist movements have almost always been related with left-wing sympathies. Left-wing does not necessarily mean "Stalin-style soviet-controlled society" â" In fact, socially, the Stalinist rule was quite a right-wing one.
Suppose that she had been a he, had been white, had been the star quarterback and was expelled and charged as an adult for exactly the same act.
No one would say it was about race or anything else of that sort. Would that make it any less outrageous?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Yeah! You'll shoot your eye out!!
America, the land of no more freedom.
Yes, because this 15 year old child definitely deserves to have her life ruined by a felony conviction for a science experiment mistake. There's a reason we don't normally charge children as adults -- well, actually there are many. Chief among them is the fact that children are still learning, and don't yet have the experience to make adult decisions.
Take a moment to consider what a felony conviction does to a person. It's not like she does her time and then lives the rest of her life. She has to check that box on every job application she fills out. She can't finish high school the normal way, and so a promising-sounding young student who has an obvious enthusiasm for science will have one hell of a time getting accepted to college, further harming her chances for gainful employment.
Yeah, she should DEFINITELY carry this albatross around her neck for the rest of her life as a result of a poor decision made when she was 15 that didn't even harm anyone. That makes total sense.
In my first year at college, I pushed a friend (by accident) through a plate glass window. The college authorities fined me £50 and asked me to be more careful. [friend] was taken to hospital, lost a small slice of an ear IIRC but was otherwise ok.
We were sitting in the college bar, pretty drunk, and there were these thick radiators that ran along the windows which people sat on. [friend] had slid down between the radiator and the plate glass (10' x 10') window, and I thought it'd be a fine idea to get him stuck down there, so pushed him down as hard as I could...
Plate glass windows make a lot of noise when they break...
I do remember grabbing hold of him and pulling him back as soon as it happened, which may be why he still talks to me :) It may also be why he didn't get a sheet of glass through his neck, Exorcist-style.
The dean in charge of my hall-of-residence was particularly scathing when he found out I was studying physics at the time, various comments about the fragility of glass were made, but his (and the college's) attitude was "shit happens around students". The fine was their way of saying "don't be a dick, again".
Of course, this was the UK, not the US. I also wrote a networked virus without ending up in jail...
Physicists get Hadrons!
This is just a kid screwing around with a common noisemaker, its not a felony, and its a lot easier to clean up than some diet coke and mentos.
Bottles.
...are still not arrested for raising an attacking thug, while the indian blooded assault victim is being prosecuted for defending himself
The trouble is because it's likely it made a loud boom.
Now instead she could have made chlorine gas, phosgene, or mustard gas. Those are things you can also make easily enough with chemicals found in a garage or a highschool chemistry lab and a highschool level understanding of chemistry. And they have potential to be much more dangerous than a glorified firecracker made from a plastic soda bottle. But since they don't go "BOOM!", whatever experiment that could be devised for those substances would probably have been deemed acceptable.
I hear they will be arresting 4 year olds next if their birthday balloon pops
Look man I know that kicking her to the curb is a bit harsh but she did two things firstly, she violated the zero tolerance policy, but now that it involves a kid who was half way decent you don't want it to apply, I bet that if she was a straight F student you wouldn't care in the slightest wake up people.
Secondly she lied and said it was a project, hey dumb ass the teacher said that it wasn't so just shut up
This is terrorism, plain and simple. So why is this terrorist still alive? She isn't a he, and she's BLACK, so obviously she's a muslim and doesn't deserve any this "due process" bullshit you liberals keep whining about. Where was the NRA-trained security guard? If we had more people with guns on campus, maybe justice would have been served by now. Surely they could have picked her off with a nice, clean headshot as soon as they heard the explosion. Yeah, yeah, I hear you commies complaining that maybe some other kid would have been hit... bullshit. Those NRA heroes are highly trained and besides, anyone near this black muslim terrorist must have been an accomplice.
It's high time that these impressionable youngsters understood that anything related to STEM education serves no purpose in our modern society and must be punished with the full wrath of our Nation's glorious military industrial complex.
One time I put balsa wood spars at the bottom of a dry cleaner bag, lit a couple of birthday candles in the center and held it over the BBQ to fill with hot air. It floated up and slowly glided along like a flickering glowing ball. I caused a huge traffic jam as the whole west end of the city got out of their cars to watch the UFO. When the candles burnt out it just disappeared. Many people saw it zooming off into space, which I sincerely doubt.
After reading the actual statements of the girl, I think the story is reported completely incorrectly. What appears to have happened is:
1. Some kid convinced this girl to do this outside of school (probably to be funny, probably because he had seen YouTube videos of it). He assured her it was only going to "make some smoke".
2. The girl did it at the behest of her friend.
3. When confronted she claimed it was a science experiment for the science fair.
Her claim that this had anything to do with the science fair seems a little tenuous since the science teacher didn't know this was going to happen and that it happened not at home (where most science fair projects are done), nor in a science lab, but outside on the school grounds. Also, explosions and/or vinegar and baking soda style reactions are not usually part of a high school science fair project. She was probably scared and just trying to come up with a good excuse quickly.
Now does she deserve expulsion? I don't think so. I think that is more an overreaction to the Boston bombings than anything else. Also, I think the friend is probably at least as culpable as she is.
If this kind of thing gets people arrested and tried as adults, how come this guy is still walking free?
My school started the same policy. I used to just takedown and leave it at that. They've been embarrased, fights over.
Then they changed the rules. Both parties were suspended. It was actually used to bring peoples marks down! The bully types would hit someone just to get a week off, and the/victim/ lost out on a week, even if it was during a test/exam.
I happened to be 6' at 14, so guess how well that went over for the other guy the first time someone started shit after the rule change. Broke his nose, choked him out. Was going to just fuck him up, but teachers were getting there at that point.
Administration asked me why I did it. I asked them if I would have been suspended for standing there and getting my ass kicked. They said "Yes" and I said "Well at least now I've earned the punishment" This was 2004.
In Grade 10, I was was basically the only IT support within 200km. Actually got to spend half my time dealing with IT work, half in class. /Still graduated at 16 with extra credits and 95 average //Still never backed down from a fight. Just got in-school suspensions instead, I made myself needed onsite. ///Now, I would have gone to jail for half the shit I pulled.
When I did (university level) chemistry, we were told that bases were actually more dangerous to your eyes than equally strong acids.
The caustic solution will form a scale on the surface of the eye, and continue to damage the cornea underneath whereas acids will wash out with water. (Although I guess this only applies if you have the chance to wash it out.)
The real reason for the fear of acids over bases is all the movies where the bad guys throw acid in someones face, and that it is easier to get hold of really strong acids than strong bases.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
perfect way to encourge kids to go into STEM, especially girls
I agree with others posting here that the correct response (given that no-one was hurt, no damage was done and there was no intent to hurt anyone or cause any damage and given that this kid was otherwise a model student and had never done anything wrong before) was NOT to call the cops but to give the kid a week of detentions or maybe a weeks suspension, maybe combined with a stern warning to the kid (and the school as a whole at the next school assembly or something) not to do such things again because people might get hurt.
No. Your mistake is in thinking the police protect you, or anything, really. The police don't care to help or protect anyone, They're just there to punish. You don't call them to protect you, you call them to punish those they can't protect you against. In other words, calling the police makes you a bitch.
I'll admit to teaching in the same county, just on the other side of it, and I'm posting AC since I'd like to keep my job. At this point, thanks to Aurora, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon bombing, school and district administrators are very touchy about anything having to do with safety or security. Lock downs, fire drills, and security drills have been extremely frequent. We even had a presentation on school safety/ security that talked about the incident at Beslan in 2004, no matter how unlikely such a scenario is in the U.S. is. They were primed to overreact, and I think they did.
In the end though, let's be honest about the whole thing. This student created an illegal explosive device by mixing those chemicals. She did this fully knowing that even just a bunch of smoke would likely cause panic at the school. Possibly enough panic that someone could have gotten hurt during the rush to evacuate. Did she do something stupid? Absolutely. Did she do something against the student code of conduct? Absolutely. Did she do something illegal? Yep. Did anyone get hurt? Thankfully, no. Do I think she should have been expelled? Probably not. Suspension would probably have been more warranted. Do I think she should have been arrested? Definitely not, but she did do something illegal, and it's up to the state's attorney to decide.
As far as blaming it solely on the administrators and teachers, you can take that sentiment and shove it. Are there shitty administrators? Fuck yeah. I deal with one real knucklehead on a regular basis, but the bulk (at least at my school and the ones I've dealt with at county) are generally trying to do their best. Are there shitty teachers? Fuck yeah, but I'm having a whole ton of trouble seeing how this could possibly be the fault of a teacher. Any reasonably intelligent student would know that this was a BAD IDEA, and they would be in a crap ton of trouble if they were caught. In regards to flaws in our education system as a whole being a throwback to an Enlightenment based factory system designed on the premise of churning out a product, I can sympathize with the view, and I invite you to help educators in overhauling the system with something that works better (for the love of the flying spaghetti monster, please!), but until that glorious day, we're stuck with what we have.
Clearly what happened is a girl looked up how to make a small scale explosive and did it in the school yard. Got caught and claimed it was a science experiment, then went further to claim it is racism. Ridiculous, she got caught and is trying to deflect condemnation from pointing at her behavior.
America has effectively criminalized teenage hijinks and curiosity. Non conformist behavior is cracked down upon - hard.
I've said it before: the country is unhinged and more than a little crazed.
I suppose it depends on if you believe the worst cases of racism are those that are easily identifiable. Personally, I think the fact that USA employers (nationalwide) give over 30% fewer callbacks for a resume that has a black sounding name (vs. an identical resume with a 'regular' or traditionally white sounding name) is tremendously worse than the inane chants of drunk football hooligans.
Unless the kid who was let off the BB gun charge shot and killed his brother while he was at school, then I'm failing to see how the cases are comparable. It's one thing to blow something up at school, you have the potential to hurt a mass of people, and given events of the past 10 years or so, that's kind of a big deal.
Near as I can tell, the kid who shot his brother took place at home. As such, this reeks of sensationalist journalism (which is pretty much par for the course when it comes to Huffington Post, sadly). I strongly suspect that the Huff Post article author look into the ASA's case history to find a case where she let a white go, and decided to prosecute the black one. Since I happen to be an intelligent and discerning adult, I have to ask myself, who's actually pushing a racist agenda here?
Now, with that out of the way. I did this "experiment" when I was a kid as well. We didn't style it a science experiment. We did it as a halloween prank. We used aluminum foil, pool cleaner, and a 2 liter bottle. Dropped the foil in, sealed up the bottle, and tossed it down a sewer. When it went boom, it scared the hell out of folks for a few blocks and made some shock waves felt farther out then we expected. We had such a good laugh, we did it again in another part of the neighborhood.
Now that I'm older, I realize how incredibly foolish we were, not to mention that there was danger existant that we weren't aware of. If someone had gotten hurt, I'd never have forgiven myself.
I think the felony charges is an overreaction on the part of law enforcement, and is a panicked reaction to the events of Columbine, VT, and Sandy Hook. I sincerely hope that once everyone involved has had a chance to settle down and not let their emotions get the better of them, that they'll drop the felony charges and not ruin the girls life.
I find myself unable to argue against the explusion though. I think the school board would probably be up to it's ears in rabid parents if they hadn't expelled her, and I don't think they want to be answering questions from angry parents about the safety of their children ad nauseum.
The student displayed poor judgement, and is about to learn that actions have consequences. I just hope that the adults are willing to show a little grace.
its the DA pressing the charges and attempting to get her tried as an adult who should be bitch slapped...and disbarred for exercising such poor judgement.
But yes, the prosecutor should be shredded. The challenge is to get the jury to do it if the judge won't; a verdict of contempt of court for the prosecutor for wasting the court's time would be a great outcome but probably too much to hope for.
So the answer is to look rather hard at the rule book - health and safety is usually a good starting point - and find all the serious infractions that are occurring in her office etc etc. It's impossible to live by the rules because they are so complex - which is a deeply scary situation for all of us; if 'the man' want to remove us for something, then he can...
It was a kid in the playground making an explosive device out of a coke bottle, aluminum foil, and drain cleaner, replicated what she'd seen on Youtube.
It was not for class. It was not a science fair. It was some dumb shit being stupid with dangerous chemicals in an unsupervised, uncontrolled, and unsafe environment.
I fully support expelling her from school.
With that said, charging her with a felony is ludicrous, unless it can be proved beyond reasonable doubt that she intended to hurt someone else with the device.
but hey....
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think all who read the article agree that the school's response, and in particular that of the school police is completely disproportional, and in fact unreasonable. The fact that one could, if one is so inclined, construe the fact that the chemistry experiment more or less exploded as 'discharge of a weapon' does not mean it is an obvious or justified way to proceed.
Unfortunately, this act of 'throwing the book' at a high school kid for messing up a science experiment very 'American' in its callousness, up to and including the rote disavowal of responsibility on part of the authorities disingeneously parroting stock phrases about "'acts' and 'consequences'".
Clearly in a position of authority one can destroy a young student's life with impunity (an unwarranted criminal record, a huge and irreparable blemish on her CV, plus in all probability a set of ruined grades that will put paid to whatever chance she had of entering college or university), simply because the family in question doesn't seem able to pay for a pricey lawyer or wield the kind of community power that would guarantee a quiet 'settlement' without adverse consequences.
As to 'playing the race card', it's no secret that racism is alive and well in the US, especially the South. This is particularly well-documented, and one certainly doesn't need to refer to the Rodney King affair to provide examples. It is therefore not unreasonable to suspect that this particular over-the-top punishment (for that is what this is) has racist roots. But suspicion is not proof of course.
Admittedly this particular affair could well be the result of equal-opportunity stupidity and callousness. An investigation of the school's record for punishment by race could shed light on this aspect.
However, I feel that the BB-gun anecdote is pertinent, as it highlights a double standard: extreme permissiveness towards guns and deaths caused by them but a hysterical response to a stupid chemistry experiment gone wrong.
If nothing else, the affair serves as an educational example of what to expect in the way of justice, fairness, consideration and wisdom on part of petty officials in the US.
We actually built small mortar and pestle-ground bombs out of KNO3, sugar, carbon, and pure sulfur at my high school. Someone used too much and blew theirs clear up and nobody really cared. We almost purposely made chlorine gas and then I accidentally breached the container and got a mouthful and felt immensely sick all day but nobody really cared either, lol. And this was a top rated high school in my state, not some dump like the next town over, lol.
Not explosive. In that case, it'd be a ballistically induced projectile weapon!
Obligatory Ayn Rand:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
We were in the back yard making rockets out of a film canister and vinegar/baking soda. OMFG we could totally go to jail. What will my six-year-old do in prison? I hope he knows to make somebody his bitch the very first day.
Holy infringement of free speech, Batman! Can I assume that the school administrators and police involved were appropriately punished?
That is not a trivial consequence, especially considering that (at least around here) expulsions apply to the entire county-wide school system. It means your entire family would have sell the house and move, and potentially even change jobs.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
“Destructive device” means any bomb, grenade, mine, rocket, missile, pipebomb, or similar device containing an explosive, incendiary, or poison gas and includes any frangible container filled with an explosive, incendiary, explosive gas, or expanding gas, which is designed or so constructed as to explode by such filler and is capable of causing bodily harm or property damage;
*snip*
“Destructive device” does not include: (a)A device which is not designed, redesigned, used, or intended for use as a weapon;
*snip*
(5)“Explosive” means any chemical compound or mixture that has the property of yielding readily to combustion or oxidation upon application of heat, flame, or shock, including but not limited to dynamite, nitroglycerin, trinitrotoluene, or ammonium nitrate when combined with other ingredients to form an explosive mixture, blasting caps, and detonators; but not including: ... [fireworks, guns, and toy rockets]
So unless this was intended to be a weapon, it is not a "destructive device" under the law. If it did not lead to combustion or oxidation (read fire), then it's not an "explosive" under the law. It may be a "bomb," but only in the same sense as a cherry bomb.
So I'm really curious what felony they think they can charge her with, because it's certainly not one of these. It might be against school policy, but there's no way a felony charge will stick. The DA is foolish to try it.
I guess you flunked your chemistry class, that's why you're so bitter (and stupid). There is no acid produced in this reaction, you basically have Al interacting with NaOH.
Referring to this minor exothermic reaction as "fucking dangerous bombs" just shows your complete lack of perspective about life in general. Did you know that any car dealership has "bombs" on their lot (these make a loud BANG! when explode and clearly have the ability to kill and maim people)?
Expelled?
Fuck you: I have no other words for morons like you
I recently watched an old movie staring Mickey Rooney as the young Thomas Edison. In one scene, Edison makes some nitroglycerin and disaster is only averted when he shows it to a knowledgeable military officer on the train - this results in some tense moments before the explosive can be disposed of. Although Edison did get into some real trouble over this, he was lucky that the current legal climate wasn't in effect back then. Now he'd be charged with a dozen serious crimes, including the manufacture of WMDs, and find himself locked up for the rest of his life.
I'm not even getting why some people are calling for a detention. This is (although now probably a was) a model student doing a glorified equivalent of a vinegar and baking soda reaction. A slap on the wrist and stern warning would be enough to scare her.
We're shooting ourselves in the foot here. Because of 'drugs and terrorism', we've all but killed the field of chemistry, for instance my university was very close to closing its entire chemistry department in the latest cutbacks. Since chemistry is the most everyday and understandable science, we are alienating most people from what science actually is besides just another authority. Science article readership is down 50% over the last generation, and stupid reactions like this are just making things worse.
Thirty years ago, my high school chemistry teacher taught our (A.P.) class how to make some explosives. What better way to effectively demonstrate exothermic reactions?
And my teacher demonstrated lithium+water reactions, nitrogen triiodine crystals, hydrogen vs. hydrogen+oxygen mixture ignition, etc. With an abundance of safety talk and equipment so that we understood how dangerous some of the demos were.
If I'd dropped a chunk of lithium in a bucket of water on school property, I would fully have expected to be hauled before the principal. She had no business conducting unsupervised chemistry on school property - I refuse to use the term "experiment", because I think that's absolute bullshit. She was constructing a draino bomb as a prank, pure and simple, and was caught.
Please help metamoderate.
So basically it's your fault if the chemical gets in your eyes and you don't wash it out fast enough, not the person who brought the chemical and made it explode everywhere? Makes sense.
Stick to the liberal arts paths, kids...
You can't get arrested or expelled for writing a pretty poem or sticking a cross in a jar with pee, after all. Just don't draw a picture of a gun.
I had a sucky sig.
Holy infringement of free speech, Batman! Can I assume that the school administrators and police involved were appropriately punished?
Nope, there was no retribution. Though at least in the end (and a few weeks later) the charges were dropped, and the expulsion was revoked. He was subsequently allowed to wear the shirt, and several other students at the school wore the exact same shirt in order to express solidarity.
It means your entire family would have sell the house and move, and potentially even change jobs.
No, usually there are charter schools available pretty much anywhere, and are funded as part of the normal education system. Many of these charter schools are there for that exact reason. After a year or so they could remove the expulsion after demonstrated good behavior.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I'm pretty sure the felony prosecution is bogus, considering what Polk county is like in general. But I'm going to set the race debate aside, since no one is going to change any minds on that subject anyway. What I'm looking at are:
1) The explosion was "small" but was apparently big enough to be heard pretty far away. This wasn't a test-tube "pop" experiment with hydrogen. On the other hand, no damage to people or property was reported. So "was it bigger than a firecracker?", "was it bigger than a cherry bomb?". And what prosecutions for other commercially available "explosive devices" have taken place in Florida in the past? You know those cases must be out there. Fireworks are sold legally in most parts of FL and all it takes is an adult stupid enough to provide the fireworks to an equally stupid kid.
2) She elected to do it on school grounds and not in the science lab or at home. I think this was more of "let's reproduce that YouTube video" and less "science experiment" than is being claimed. OTOH, it clearly was an _experiment_ and not an attempt to actually damage anything.
3) We have no information on what, if any, safety precautions she had in place. Being a teenager, probably none, but we don't know.
4) There's a strong hint that she's protecting another kid here. If she was just doing it on her own, she could have done it nearer to her home. I bet they'd drop all charges if she coughed up a name, and it wouldn't surprise me if the overblown response is just a form of coercion because the authorities have the same suspicions.
From my POV for a expulsion, I'd be looking for something like a 1/4 stick of dynamite sized explosion, and for a felony prosecution, I'd be looking for actual damage to body or property. There's certainly enough intent and stupidity on her part here to justify a suspension and maybe a misdemeanor prosecution for attempting to cover it up as a "science" experiment, but I don't see evidence to go beyond that.
We are the 198 proof..
If she was brown (Asian brown, not Mexican brown), you would see FBI, DHS, ATF, CIA, NSA, [fill in 3 letter Federal agencies] at that school and international news coverage on the case.
The bit that gets me is that a school actually has a formal rule saying "expulsion for any student in possession of a bomb (or) explosive device... while at a school (or) a school-sponsored activity". My schools tended to have rules about playing conkers or skidding on ice but this is a different league. Also is generating a little bit of hydrogen 'possession of a bomb or explosive device'? If so then bombs are everywhere.
Perhaps her parents will enroll her in a educational process where her highly active intelligence isn't constantly being beaten down to a sub-par level?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
If I had made a draino bomb at school, I would have been expelled too. I happen to be a white male who did many science "experiments" too, usually involving blowing stuff up. I was smart enough to do it away from authorities considering that it was and still is illegal. she could have seriously chemically burned herself or people around her. Also she could have caused a projectile strike injury from shards of bottle that go flying. Sounds like the school acted appropriately. Calling someone an honor student doesn't give them a get out of jail card.
I guess BB guns get a pass because guns are traditionally the most recognized among the "arms" that a member of an American gun club has "the right [...] to keep and bear".
When I was a kid one of our class science experiments was to see who could make the best gunpowder using the classic Chinese formula.
Thank goodness for growing up in the 1960s when you could do fun things in school without being arrested.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
"Everyone involved is guilty" is also an approach taken from extreme "socialism", as practiced under Stalin. Interesting to see that these concepts now are implemented in the US. Guess when it comes to oppress your citizens properly, the USSR is an useful model.
On the matter at hand, can a society become even more non-free and anti-curiosity than this?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And can easily cause the loss of limb, burns, and blindness.
That there are idiots playing with this stuff on youtube, or that the student is an honor student, or that the student is black , has nothing to do with anything.
That the law regulates posession of this as a 15 years felony is however dumb. According to this law, it would be a felony to make popcorn.
But it is far from a harmless prank.
A harmless prank is setting fire to a paper bag full of dog poo, ringing the door bell and hiding.
This "harmless" prank could have caused grave injury to the girl or bystanders.
In the old days, say 15 years ago, when kids were caught doing something like this, you would take them to the principal's office for a talking to, and call for the parents. Bringing in police and automatic expulsion is a bad sign of the times.
.
Indeed. And zero intelligence basically means those deciding have stopped being human beings and have become soulless, compassion-less automatons with no independent effective intelligence whatsoever. That used to be the hallmark of the servants of the devil. While I am an atheist, this comparison seems to be spot-on to me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
and current NASA troubles. Just saying.
You don't call them to protect you, you call them to punish those they can't protect you against. In other words, calling the police makes you a bitch.
Oh, look, it's John Fucking Galt. Do everyone a favor and move to Somalia if you don't approve of the rule of law.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Isn't drano Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH). It's a strong base used to turn fats into soap. I used to use it all the time as a kid to make hydrogen (in 1l glass bottles with a baloon). It's very exothermic but not a particularly fast reaction unless you can get powdered aluminium. She probabbly did it in a sealed container which would be very dumb, esp on school property.
All the dangerous stuff I did as a kid was good for learning risk management. Today, I feel like maybe the idocracy movie has some truth to it.
46137
Ah, the good time experiment with household chemical - Chlorox and Windex. .... literally tears.
Bring back tears to my eyes
It is standard practice. Charge as much as you can possibly get away with and plea bargain down from there.
In that case, why wasn't the "standard practice" applied to the boy?
Um, could it be because the boy isn't a minority, perhaps? Yes, I'm playing the race card, but... It's abundantly clear that in America black people are often charged with more serious offenses than whites for the same act, are convicted at trial more often than whites, and receive much harsher sentences than whites convicted of the same crime. No, I don't have links on hand but the statistics do back me up, since I'm lazy I leave verification as an exercise for the /. reader. The point is, given the long-standing and well documented evidence of discriminatory prosecution of black people in this country, it's not at all unreasonable in this case to focus on the race of the accused. If the shoe fits...
Retards rule your nation, it's pretty much official that you've gone full nazi anti-science...
Rape where the victim is white gets more severe punishments than where the victim is black. Black defendants in Washington, D.C. are much more likely to be exonerated (through jury nullification) than white defendants. NYPD Stop-and-frisks are around 2.3 million for blacks but 450K for whites. Pot use is higher among whites while pot arrests are higher among blacks. These are a few easily quantifiable bits of data. You also get the white "privilege" (horrible name for it) factor, i.e. you basically get treated with slightly more respect by default if you're white.
Race is (most likely) irrelevant here; the local police and school are taking grossly immoral actions for which they should be fired, but that has to do with raising children, not race. (The two are correlated, because there are usually better schools in more affluent neighborhoods where there are fewer minorities, but that does not make race the cause of the idiocy.)
Plain and simple, she made a bomb. If she was intelligent enough to be an honor student, she knew it was a bomb, and as such, she should be expelled.
We used to do this to get hydrogen to fill and launch weather balloons. It was difficult for kids to come up with helium in Alaska in the 60s...
We as a society have become to politically correct and hysterical that we cannot tell difference between a bomber and a student. This is a horror and ruined a young girls life shame on school.
I only had to do a frigging day of detention "lunch" for setting off a couple of m80's in the hallway. "1999"
Yes. And since the school isn't even trying to handle it internally, the correct police response is to caution the school it is neglecting minors under its care.
When I was in high school, that sort of thing got us more homework. Or maybe it was the homework? The memory isn't entirely clear, but I did have a pretty cool AP Chemistry class.
Cole Withrow was expelled and arrested for accidentally leaving his unloaded shotgun in his truck and being stupid/honorable enough to attempt to correct the issue. An assistant principal of the school did the exact same thing and was forced to take three days of paid leave when someone else reported her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_High_School_(North_Carolina)#Controversy
http://www.wral.com/classmates-rally-around-princeton-student-expelled-for-gun-in-car/12401713/
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=9087003
Indeed. I don't even buy the "I didn't know what would happen" part. If you don't know what would happen, then why on earth would you toss aluminum foil into a bottle of drain cleaner anyway? ...and then put a lid on it! Beyond any doubt, the girl knew exactly what she was doing. ...or, at least, if her claims that a friend told her to do it are true, then her friend knew exactly what would happen.
I made probably a hundred of these bombs when I was a kid, so I know a bit about them. ...and I definitely experimented, by trying different bottles, different ratios of the ingredients, etc. Thick-walled hard plastic bottles work best, and the heat generated is required to weaken the plastic, as the things really do not want to explode underwater. Also, expect to end up with a large patch of dead grass in your backyard. I never tried it myself, but I learned from watching the news that some kids like to fill the bottles with rocks as well, then leave them at someone's front door, and ring the bell. There are apparently some kids who'd rather do this to cause harm rather than simply experiment, believe it or not. I can't imagine that would be very effective, however. While it does make a nice loud noise, and spray acid everywhere, I don't think there's enough energy involved to significantly accelerate a bunch of pebbles.
The reaction is between aluminum and hydrochloric acid. While I don't know enough chemistry to tell you what exactly that results in, I can tell you that the fumes that come off of it smell metallic, and aren't anything you'd feel comfortable breathing (probably because you shouldn't). Given the presence of chlorine in the reaction, there's a good chance that chlorine gas is one of the products of the reaction.
While everyone is saying "no one was hurt," the simple fact is that this is an incredibly stupid thing to do in public. Someone very easily could have been hurt. While hydrochloric acid is fairly tame, and I can't imagine it causing injury unless it was left on the skin for an extended period of time (like an hour), it would still certainly be quite painful if it got in anyone's eyes. ...and again, once the bottle explodes, the fumes come out and go wherever the wind takes them. The potential for injury may be small -- and so it isn't a bad experiment for kids if it is done with proper precautions -- but without proper safety measures being taken, there is absolutely a potential for injury. You really need to be certain that no one will go near the bottle after it's been sealed, and that everyone is far enough away to avoid the spray of acid and to make sure the wind is blowing away from the spectators.
Also, this "science fair experiment" seems to be complete bullshit. It seems it was done outside the school during some sort of period when the kids are allowed to roam free and do whatever they want. It in no way had anything to do with her school work, but was just something she says a friend advised her to do, and so she brought the materials from home, apparently without even trying it at home, so that she could try it at school, without informing any adults of what she planned to do. That's a hell of a suspicious story and definitely worth some investigation, particularly to find out if it's true that someone else told her to do this, since they would deserve some punishment as well.
Also, as for everyone saying that the police shouldn't be involved, I just have to comment on how, while I was in school, bullies were the norm, but then when I got out of school, everyone in public was generally nice and sociable. It's amazing how much easier life becomes when everyone who would do you harm is no longer protected by the "they're only kids" excuse. As far as I'm concerned, the police don't get involved in school problems often enough. Every time a kid hits another kid, they simply need to be arrested, as that sort of bullshit shouldn't be tolerated. Give them a few days in juve
Actually, "The Works" is hydrochloric acid. However, your point is largely correct anyway. It's fairly safe as far as acids go. Unlike something like sulfuric acid which will eat your skin off rather easily, hydrochloric acid isn't much different than water as far as skin contact goes, at least in the concentrations used in "The Works." If I heard of anyone suffering a skin injury from it, I'd have to wonder if they didn't pour it on themselves and then intentionally leave it for an hour. Like you say, with any sort of reasonable reaction, anyone who came in contact with it would be just fine.
That said, I don't agree at all with the people saying that this should just result in a suspension and nothing else. The "science fair experiment" is clearly just an excuse. It had nothing to do with her school work, none of her teachers knew she was doing it, it was done during free time rather than during class (and especially not at any science fair), she brought the ingredients from home and yet claims to have never tried it before, etc. There's no way in hell she didn't know what she was doing. Any kid who was just experimenting would have either tried it at home, or at least went to a teacher for assistance.
When I was in Jr. High I had a science teacher who, playing Mr. Wizard, mixed secret chemical A with secret chemical 2, and spontaneous ignition occurred in less than a minute. She was reading the textbook while she did it. Unfortunately, she used about a cup of each ingredient when she should have used a thimble full.
As the noxious fumes made breathing and visibility in the room difficult, she quickly evacuated us to the school cafeteria. It ranks very high on my list of great days at school.
Anyway, overcharging is now standard operating procedure for prosecutors. Non-whites, and Muslims get more overcharging and with less average wealth are less able to afford a decent defense. Remember O.J.? I don't think he was overcharged, but he had enough $$ to mount a defense in his murder trial.
Try here: http://www.change.org/petitions/the-bartow-police-and-bartow-high-school-drop-charges-against-kiera-wilmot Not yet sure if they're accepting donations, but possible to add ones voice to the already loud throng.
What the fuck?
"She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked, too."
Shocked? Have they heard of youtube? Not to mention drain cleaner + aluminum foil produces a toxic gas - much safer to use dry ice + water(though you have to transport the ice I suppose) Just because nobody was hurt doesn't mean it wasn't incredibly stupid. Though I agree the punishment was harsh, certainly if anything the science teacher should be in trouble for allowing this to happen.
Well, I AM SAYING IT'S OK!
This is how you learn science. By experimenting. And usually best not by some overly controlled micromanaged experiment. You learn very little from that.
I can't straighten out this young person's life in view of the excessive charges being brought against her, or even get her back in school (though I think she has been ill served by the one she is in).
So, I humbly propose May 1st to be known as the Kiera Wilmot Science Day. On this day, I encourage teachers, scientists and adult volunteers of all stripes to perform a science experiment for the next generation. Invite them to see a chemical reaction, look through a telescope, search for fossils, or hell, just watch a gyroscope and think about what keeps it from falling over. Ask the kids what they think happened, how they would prove what they think happened, design the next experiment, etc etc.
Since the school system cannot do it, it is up to individuals to instill curiosity and wonder to the younger set.
Myself and about 4 other friends of mine in high-school did the same thing with HCL and aluminum with 2 liter bottles. We also used c02 dry ice an other fun things. Not to mention we distilled hydrogen with batteries and other methods to fill balloons and create big mushroom clouds, by which we lit by using alcohol poured on concrete in front of our house. Our parents sometimes watched us other times Not. Our neighbor was a fire marshal and sometimes watched for fun. We would video tape these experiments and our AP chem teacher would play them for our class. It was celebrated. Potassium was my fav. Now 2 of above friends are chemists. One of them teaching. Another a computer science grad that works for amazon and I'm a sys admin doing network defense. Good thing our school supported us. When we did dumb stuff they called our parents. None of us have criminal records.
Indeed.
What was the research? Where was the supervision.
Anyone can claim an experiment, but this sounds more like a prank gone wrong. It doesn't sound like reason for an arrest (at least not once sorted out), but it may be grounds for a suspension/expulsion depending on severity.
Um, It isn't Drano, it's Excel toilet bowl cleaner. Drano is chlorine-bleach based these days, although it used to be lye back decades ago.
The acid in the Excel liberates the energy held in the aluminum, which is what actually explodes. Battery acid would probably result in a bigger explosion.
I haven't tried it, but I doubt mixing drano with aluminum would do much if anything. Now, if you want to be a terrorist mix Drano (or better yet, plain old laundry bleach) with Comet. It makes mustard gas when mixed.
This is a side issue, but calling everything that shoots BBs a BB gun is misleading. Most people will think of a spring-powered "Daisy" when they hear "BB gun", and it would be very difficult to kill a person with one of those. The gun mentioned in the article is probably a pump type "air gun" capable of shooting BBs or pellets at a much higher velocity than a spring-powered gun.
In any case, this is a case of a severe and tragic failure of parental responsibility. A parent who gives a BB gun of any type to a child should spend several hours training the child in proper gun use, emphasizing SAFETY. Things like: Use the safety but don't rely on it. Don't aim the gun at people. Don't shoot at anything where, if you miss, you don't know where the bullet goes. Don't have the gun cocked except when you're about to shoot it. Keep your finger outside the guard except when you're about to shoot. And much more.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
what i read was a girl who did something because her friend told her to not because she was doing a science fair project.
I had dinner with a H.S. teacher recently and I was amazed at how things have changed. For example, it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT. Even a basic fistfight with no weapons and no serious injuries. "Ridiculous" is right.
How does a kid being bullied not count as assault? Certainly when I was at school there was a lot of bullying going on and the school simply didn't care (even when people inevitably ended up injured). Whilst I'll agree that the first port of call should be for it to be handled internally in the school, if that doesn't work shouldn't the police be involved if only for the protection of the kids on the receiving end?
Drummer in our band in Frankfurt, Germany in 2003-2004, was a teacher at International Schule of Frankfurt. USED to be a high-school teacher in Baltimore. Broke up a knife fight between two girls and HE got into trouble for allegedly touching one of the girls "inappropriately" as he tried to pull them apart. That HE or one or both of the girls could be injured was immaterial. He basically said, "F**k this!" and is still teaching in Germany.
Common sense is dead!
Hang on to your hat. The next victim will be the auto mechanic class when someone learns that autos can have 8000+ explosions per min at idle. Golly help the poor kid (or teacher) that has a backfire in the parking lot.
Next will be the ham radio club.
Followed by the computer club.
Removal of Chemistry and Physics classes will quickly follow.
Biology is next when it is learned that yeast make alcohol and cows fart lots of methane.
Learn to boil water in home education... no no no... someone could be scalded.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
This is where a Jury should nullify the law and vote NOT GUILTY because its applied without common sense to the detriment of society. Dont forget, the JURY is the peoples power to overturn law. The Jury is where the citizens get to over rule congress, the president, and the supreme court, and local law enforcement.
This is one case of legalistic getting in the way of common sense. To me there is no doubt that race is playing a role here and all those of you who are trying to squeeze some sort of legitimacy out of the actions of the DA by using some kind of Houdini logic need to really asses themselves. No single unintentional act should result in the lifelong that this decision is going to have on this girl. There are many instances of student involved in drugs and acts of violence being allowed to finish school because "it would be irresponsible for the system to discard them". It seems no child left behind unless your Black right? So now, this child will not be able to get federal funding, cannot serve her country, and might be barred from entering (some) university if she gets a record. Because of an experiment? That's what schools are for to make mistakes there, to learn. What is important and missed is that she was smart enough to know it might be dangerous and so did not endanger anyone (which ironically might work against her). We aught to be asking an even more important question, how many intelligent children have we turned into criminals in the past? How many of these "system made" criminals have become real problems in society? Some times common sense should prevail. And by the way, If the reports are correct and she was charged with possession of a bomb or explosive device, I wonder what would happen if a student dropped dry ice in a bottle of pop, closed it and placed it in a locker? Is that a bomb too? We did that crap in high school. We got some mouthing but no expulsion.
She saw the news coverage of the Boston bombings and started right away to develop the technology with which to defend freedom. "Only a good guy with a bomb can stop a bad guy with a bomb"....
RTFA...she wasn't in science class, she wasn't at a science fair. None of the teachers knew anything or assigned her to do any sort of "experiment". While the punishment does seem rather severe, the /. summary makes it sound like she was giving some demonstration and randomly got arrested. She wasn't, she just did this out of nowhere.
Before any of you experts dump your legal excellence on us, just take a look at the huffington post op ed. There is nothing indecent about it and in fact it illustrates the "School to Prison" pipeline in florida. Florida has privatized corrections. These companies also sit on the boards of sentencing guidelines. It is in their best interest to fill (or overfill) their prisons any way possible.
When Zimmerman's brother tweeted a photo of De'Marquise Elkins (a black teen who shot a white baby in the face in Georgia) and posted two photos comparing him with Trayvon Martin he was accused of unfairly linking two completely unrelated cases. Those same people who complained didn't hesitate to blame the mother of the slain white baby for supposedly staging the event (without offering any evidence) by comparing another unrelated case of a mother who had apparently lied about the death of her child many years ago. It appears that faulty guilt by association arguments are only lauded when it helps a minority?
Take a look at the statistics for which race commits a vast majority of the interracial rapes and violent hate crimes in the US. These are numbers that the media tends to shy away from. Google it right now and tell me where the real racism lies.
While the nation mourned for Trayvon Martin these stories of racially charged hate were glossed over and in some cases covered up until certain media entities brought them out.
Web search these Headlines:
'Tourist Beaten, Robbed and Stripped Naked In Baltimore As Crowd Laughes'
'White Reporters' Beating by Norfolk Black Gang Ignored by Media ... '
'Shawn Tyson found guilty of murdering British tourists'
The black killer called them "CRACKERS".
Welcome to America. It happens everyday. There are literally thousands of stories just like it.
dumb
"Don't bring up race issues in a board mostly frequented by people who rarely experience race issues."
This is printed on every bottle of toilet bowl cleaner: =================== Warnings & Directions Directions for Use: It is a violation of Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. Read the entire label before using product. Warnings & Directions =================== It doesn't take an 'A' student to realize that performing an unauthorized 'experiment' with dangerous chemicals on school property is a bad idea...I'm sure she had seen the YouTube videos of a 'Works Bomb"... oh, did I say bomb? Yes, these pack a devastating wallop and spray caustic chemicals... Tell me again how race have anything to do with it?