She got a cleaner house; the kids got alcohol, marijuana and antidepressants. That’s the exchange that cops say an Illinois high school teacher made with two 14-year-old girls.
Kym A. Krocza, a 41-year-old math teacher in a Chicago suburb, was charged with contributing to the criminal delinquency of a juvenile. Police say that the incidents took place between January and August. A mom tipped off cops when her kid came back from a visit to Teacher’s house with booze and pot, the Northwest Herald reported.
Krozca was arrested Tuesday and has since been suspended from Grant Community High School in Fox Lake. “She befriended them before they were even students of hers,” Sheriff Mark Curran told the Herald. “She enticed them with Zoloft, marijuana and alcohol, and they would come over and do favors in terms of cleaning up her house.”
Now, would it have been better or worse if she had offered them better grades instead?
Officials at an Arizona middle school thought they were justified in requiring a girl to take off her clothes as they searched for ibuprofen pills. But on Thursday, the Supreme Court said that such a search was so degrading, it wasn’t constitutional.
School authorities never did find the pills. The vice-principal at Safford Middle, near Tucson, had been told that Savana Redding had brought ibuprofen to school and planned to distribute them, an allegation that she denied. Under the school’s zero-tolerance policy, even over-the-counter pain relievers are considered contraband. Savanna, then 13, and her mother, never received an apology from the school. They sued, saying that the search violated the girl’s rights under the 4th Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches.
Justice David Souter said that the school officials lacked “an indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear.”
The only justice to disagree was Clarence Thomas, who said that judges shouldn’t second-guess how schools maintain discipline and safety.
A Ohio high school teacher has resigned after allegedly taking four cheerleaders to a gay club, according to the Advocate.
Lori Epperson, who taught at Edgewood High School, said that while she did take the girls to Club Masque in Dayton, who were ages 17 and 18, she had permission from their parents to do so. One of the girls was her own daughter.
The teens allegedly got drunk at the club, too. Epperson claims that an acquaintance who they ran into at the club helped the girls buy shots, according to WLWT.com. The matter is under investigation by local police, although no charges has been filed.
The girl would have received the same two-week punishment if she had brought a gun to school. The Fairfax County, Va., teenager was hauled to the principal’s office after someone saw her taking a prescribed birth control pill during lunchtime.
The girl’s mom knew she was taking birth control pills, but the school didn’t. So school officials consider the pills contraband. Oakton High School, like many others across the country, has a zero-tolerance policy on drugs — no drugs of any kind unless previously approved by the school nurse.
The teen and her mother, whose names were not published by the Washington Post, say the policy is too harsh. “I realize my daughter broke a rule,” the mom told the Post. But “the punishment does not fit the crime.”
School officials say they’re concerned about liability and safety. How can they enforce the rules if some students were allowed to take certain pills, but not others?
The honors student now faces a hearing to determine whether she’ll be expelled. She and her mom say that they’re embarassed that a personal decision to take birth control pills is now known among the girl’s teachers, not to mention other students.
It’s safe to say that nobody fell asleep during the lesson. A line-up of naked men showed up at a British high school to teach teens about human anatomy and sex.
“It was really interesting and the way they taught us about everything was practical and made it more understandable,” 16-year-old Tom Harvey told the Evening Post.
The Hanham High School’s assistant head teacher said the nude guys helped take some pressure off teachers: “It can be hard for both students and teachers to go from a teacher being your math teacher to being your sex education teacher.” Teens had to get permission from the parents to be in the class.
This isn’t the first time a British school has used unconventional teaching methods. One high school invited a pole dancer to perform to encourage kids to exercise and be healthy.
Students duked it out bare-fisted, and staffers gathered around to watch the matches at a Dallas high school. That’s according to the accusations made by school system investigators.
At least two fights allegedly occurred in an equipment cage in a boys’ locker room between 2003 and 2005, the Associated Press reported. It’s only now that the incidents at South Oak Cliff High have been made public. The principal is accused of knowing about the fights, but in an interview with the Dallas Morning News he denied that any such events ever happened.
The school system report cites a hall monitor saying that he witnessed the head of campus security and a basketball coach put two teens in the cage to settle their argument. Schools superintendent Michael Hinojosa acknowledged to the News that there were “some things that happened inside of a cage.”
Photo by Enggul
Waste not, want not?
Kindergarten teacher Anne O’Donnell is accused of forcing a student to eat his lunch after he tossed it in the garbage. The 5-year-old boy, who was not publicly named, had thrown out his cafeteria lunch of chicken nuggets and a banana. O’Donnell allegedly took the items out of the trash and then gave them to the boy to eat, the Associated Press reported.
O’Donnell, 67, of Fairfield, Conn., was charged on Tuesday with risk of injury to a minor. The alleged garbage-eating happened last week at Park City Magnet School.
No, TV won’t harm your baby. But it won’t turn her into a genius either, despite what those Baby Einstein video marketers say.
A new study says that preschoolers who may have watched more television as babies scored about as well on verbal and motor skills tests as those who spent less time in front of the boob tube. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, tested 872 children when they were six months old and then when they were age 3.
The average kid spends about an hour a day in front of the TV at age six months and 1.4 hours a day by age 2, according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. Kids in lower-income families or whose mother had less education are more likely to watch more TV.
The results of the study isn’t a rationale to let TV continue to babysit the kids, though. Researchers caution that as children get older, too much TV watching produces a slew of negative effects – kids become fat, lazy, sleepless and develop attention problems.
A fender bender at Greenville Middle Academy in South Carolina on Wednesday ended with one mom being arrested for driving under the influence.
Marcia Peyrouse Gaines, 49, was involved in a minor traffic accident in the school pick-up line. What tipped police off that this mother might be three sheets to the wind? When a cop asked Gaines for her driver’s license, she gave him a credit card. Testing revealed that her blood alcohol level was .23 percent, nearly three times the legal limit, according to WYFF TV News. She faces a fine of up to $1,000 or 90 days in jail.
While no one was hurt, Jason Rampey of the Greenville police said: ”I think one of the things that is so egregious about this is that there were kids present and so many other people present in this line.”
The cuffed mom apparently retained her sense of humor, if not her sobriety. When a WYFF reporter asked her for comment, she replied: ”I’m sorry you’re having such a slow news day.”
A 14-year-old Wisconsin girl who refused to stop texting during class was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Smoking Gun. The Wauwatosa East High School student’s math teacher told her to stop texting, but she refused.
When confronted by a school security officer, the girl, whose name is being withheld because she is a juvenile, initially denied that she had a phone. But a female cop frisked the texter and found the offending piece of technology in “the buttocks area.”
Barred from school property for a week, the texting teen was charged with disorderly conduct, a criminal citation, and paid a bail of $298. As for her phone, it’s been confiscated.
And you thought your teen has a bad texting habit.