We have been discussing the over-reaction officials in past cases where police have been called to address pranks or controversies once handled internally in schools. A news story out of Houston only servers to capture this absurdity. It began when Danesiah Neal, an eighth grader at Fort Bend Independent School District’s Christa McAuliffe Middle School, attempted to pay for lunch with a $2 bill given to her by her grandmother, Sharon Kay Joseph. The lunch personnel had never seen a $2 bill and what happened after that is truly absurd with school officials joining police in almost comical overreactions.
First, the school called Joseph to say that they believed that Danesiah had passed fake money. After she said that she gave Danesiah the bill, the police traced the bill back to the convenience store where Joseph recalled receiving it. They then went to the bank for an examination of the bill. The bank of course said that the $2 bill is a $2 bill. Only then did the police return the bill. No one apologized to Danesiah, of course. It is just another day in the new criminalized environment of our schools.
Just for the record, only a moronic counterfeiter would replicate the $2 dollar bill as opposed to . . . I don’t know . . . a $50. Then there is picking one of the rarest bills around to make your windfall $2 at a time. For future reference, we have had a $2 bill since March 1862 and it was brought back into production in 1976 with the design of Thomas Jefferson on the front and John Trumbull’s depiction of the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence on the back. There are currently about 1.2 billion $2 bills in circulation.
Yet, it appears that a group of teachers, administrators, and police not only appear clueless about the existence of such bills but did not seem inclined to go on the Internet to quickly confirm the truth. Instead, a police investigation was launched and a student accused of passing counterfeit money.
Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.
