90% of high students don't know the consequences of putting certain household chemicals together. When I was a student I would put anything together that can cause a spectacular reaction (mentos in coke). It is school's responsibility to make the students aware of the dangers associated with it. If not, kids will always run around trying to blow shit up because they don't fully understand the explosiveness of certain chemicals. Science classes should have more 'safe' explosions.
Meh. If someone was doing this around me I'd sure as hell want them removed from the environment. This is the exact same chemical that melted this woman's face off:
The MSDS specifically says never to mix lye and aluminum in a closed bottle. In fact, you're never supposed to go anywhere near lye without goggles and a dust mask. Kids will be kids and if they want to do this stuff in their garage then whatever, but doing this in a public place where no one has any safety gear on is wildly irresponsible and puts everyone at risk.
Permanently expelling the student and pressing felony charges might be overkill, but anything less than suspending them for a couple weeks would probably be similarly inappropriate.
This kind of shit happens when you have a totally politicized legal system from police chiefs to prosecutors to judges - being elected or political appointees makes everyone a politician. There is no sense in this nonsense - just as there isn't with so many other cases like for example Aaron Swartz - but they're easy outs for all of the politically motivated folks all the way up the food chain. Later in life when the felony conviction comes back to bite her it will do her no use to say "it was a plea bargain I avoid jail time and the crime was not even anything serious anyway just an over prosecuted misunderstanding" no-one will give a shit and will give the system the benefit of the doubt.
Funny story. The high school (and I believe the middle school too) in the town where I grew up is close enough to the CIA campus in Langley that model rockets have been known to land there and be returned by men in suits (with any cameras taken out, of course).
Florida has a reputation for having a large number of news articles where a member of the public has done something both criminal and remarkably stupid (e.g. the fellow who took pictures of his children sitting on a beached dugong and posted them online), or where government officials of done something egregiously petty and/or stupid (e.g. this case).
Wonder if it has to do with her skin color. This was nowhere near a real bomb and it sounds like a stupid prank if anything. When I was younger, I had a cap gun that looked like a real gun. I was messing around with it while everyone was taking a test. I thought it would be funny and shot off a bunch of rounds. No one got scared, they just turned their heads to the back of the room and smiled when they saw who it was. The teacher rolled her eyes and said "office". I got suspended for it, and was told that I would have to have a parent-principle meeting to go back to school. I ended up "playing hooky" from school for a month because I didn't want to tell my parents. Nowadays if I did this, I would end up with a slew of felonies. Things have really changed from the 90's....
While I can't know the internal motivations of those involved, I would observe that neither the race nor the gender issues are necessary, in the Occam's Razor sense of the term [1]. The student suspended for chewing his poptart into a gun was a 7-year-old white boy. The student suspended for discussing shooting a Hello Kitty bubble gun was a 5-year-old white girl. Zero tolerance stupidity has been doled out across the board with no apparent regard for, well, anything, like sanity, let alone race or gender lines.
The 1995 Valedictorian of my high school lit off the hydrogen in the hydrolysis experiment, because, you know, it was there. Good thing he didn't pull that stunt today. Though I imagine that experiment has probably been long removed for creating dangerous quantities of explosives in the classroom.
[1] As a reminder, Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a proof. Perhaps racism or sexism is involved, the lack of necessity is not a disproof of their presence, but the Razor suggests that aspect be cut away from your dominant hypothesis, pending future evidence requiring them in the explanation.
No, the paranoia and cocooning has been building much longer than that. After the wild period of 1960-1989, the pendulum has swung the other way and America is reliving the straight-laced 1950s.
