Educators Earn an F

Does it worry anyone else that educators--the people chosen to teach our children--seem to be so brainless, sometimes? Here are some select news stories from just the past couple of days:

• A third grader in Colorado was suspended for sniffing a Sharpie marker. The kid said, "It smelled good." The principal said, "This is really, really, seriously dangerous" and added the child could "become intoxicated." Care to guess which one is correct, the eight-year old or the principal? A toxicologist reported there is no risk from sniffing the marker. I think the school district should suspend the principal and put the child back in school!
  
  
• A former Indiana principal could face prison after showing pornographic material to students. He showed porn Web sites to two teen girls... IN HIS OFFICE! How could this guy not know with a high degree of certainty that this would get him in trouble? The incident happened in April 2006, it was reported in November 2006, and he resigned shortly thereafter. Demonstrating a startling lack of common sense, he then ran for the school board. But what's truly amazing to me is that the crack police force of Butler, IN required 17 months to finally arrest this brilliant educator.
  
  
• A Virginia principal has banned the game of "tag" from playgrounds because she believes it's become too aggressive and dangerous. I have no idea how rough the game had become at her school, but it seems odd to ban a game that children have played for generations. Even more strange: Fairfax County public schools' office of risk management has a list of activities that are prohibited at any school-sponsored events, and it includes bungee jumping, scuba diving, and break dancing. Do you think there was a lot of scuba diving and bungee jumping on the playground?!?
  
  
• A teacher in Texas suspended a student for taking a call... from his father serving in Iraq. The student's parents said they thought they'd obtained the necessary permissions from the school to permit the young man to accept the call, which normally would violate the "no cell phone" policy. But even with the policy, what sort of moron teacher and principal suspends a student for accepting a call from a parent serving in the military a world away?
  
  
• A Connecticut athletic director quit in protest after school administrators overruled her suspension for 10 days or four games of two student athletes caught with alcohol on campus. The two students had signed contracts when they joined their teams in which they acknowledged that alcohol and drug use would not be tolerated, but the cowardly administrators were worried about lawsuits. How's that for sending a strong signal that alcohol abuse won't be tolerated by the school?
  
  
• A teacher in West Virginia was suspended for sending a memo to her students saying: "If you want to act like trailer trash, I'll treat you like trailer trash." (I'll avoid the obvious West Virginia joke here.) How could a professional educator be oblivious to the problems this would cause?
  
  
• An elementary school teacher in Southern California was arrested after her students found an unloaded handgun and ammunition in an unlocked cabinet. Seriously--she thought bringing a gun to the classroom was a good idea?

I understand there are a lot of educators in the country, so maybe this number of morons are to be expected among such a large population, but the disconnect between these acts and our expectations of adults to which we entrust our children is pretty damn astounding, isn't it?