Suspended for drinking tea...

Nanny State Overdrive: School Interrogates and Suspends Student for Drinking Tea

Melissa Melton

It made national news earlier this year when a North Carolina preschool student’s homemade lunch was confiscated by school officials for not meeting USDA standards, and the four-year-old was forced to trade her turkey and cheese sandwich and banana for the school’s pink-slime-filled chicken nuggets. Now the fight for parents’ rights and healthy food in public schools has just been ratcheted up a notch.

The nanny state was thrown into overdrive last week when an elementary student in one California school district was interrogated by school officials and a police officer all day and subsequently suspended for five days for the dastardly crime of bringing a kombucha tea in his school lunch.

The school also reportedly told the child he may have to sign up for a youth alcoholics program. All of this was apparently done, at least initially, without a parent or guardian present.

The police officer who responded reportedly told the child that kombucha — a mushroom tea that has been around for thousands of years and has numerous documented health benefits — was illegal and could be dangerous if the boy ingested it while taking medications.

As it is fermented from bacteria and yeast, kombucha does contain a trace amount of alcohol, typically less than half a percent. In fact, back in 2010, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau released a report stating that any kombucha containing over 0.5% alcohol must be officially classified as “kombucha wine.” According to numerous sites, if fermented in the traditional way, kombucha contains little, if any, alcohol.

Meanwhile, there are schools that still offer vending machines filled with Coca-Cola and Pepsi products. Should we call the cops on these school officials for distributing alcohol to minors? According to the insane logic mentioned above we should, considering that these sodas have also been found to contain trace amounts of alcohol according to a National Institute of Consumption in Paris released in 2010.

Or should we be concerned that many schools are adding antibacterial hand sanitizer to their student supply lists? The Centers for Disease Control has proclaimed such sanitizers must be at least 60% alcohol to be effective, a percentage equal to a shot of 120-proof liquor. Over the past few years, stories have surfaced where teens have been hospitalized with alcohol poisoning after drinking the substance, and one seven-year-old girl was even rushed to the ER after she was able to ingest enough at her Virginia elementary school to be knocked unconscious.

As Infowars has previously reported, schools are not stopping at acting as just “food police” either.

In one San Antonio, Texas school district, students are being forced to wear RFID tracking chips in their ID badges. Parents are protesting, not simply because it is a First Amendment and privacy violation, but RFIDs could also put the children who wear them in danger. These chips never turn off, and as Heather Favio of Texans for Accountable Government found out, with $30 and a Freedom of Information Act request, a complete list of district students’ names and addresses was released to her:

“Using this information along with an RFID reader means a predator could use this information to determine if the student is at home and then track them wherever they go. These chips are always broadcasting so anyone with a reader can track them anywhere,” Fazio explained.

At the time of writing this article, the school revoked the suspension over the kombucha tea, but that does not take away the damage inflicted on an elementary school-aged child by keeping him out of class all day, calling a uniformed officer in to help interrogate him about his “illegal” beverage, and then threatening him with a youth alcohol treatment course and suspending him for five days without his parent or guardian present.

Student and parent rights should not end simply because a kid walks onto school property. It is clear this aggressive police state conditioning is being forced upon our children more and more every day, likely because they are the younger and more impressionable members of society. Parents need to stay vigilant and protect themselves and their children’s rights; this crazy train has yet to reach its destination.

Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/nanny-state-overdrive-school-interrogates-and-suspends-student-for-drinking-tea.html