Welcome back. Not surprisingly I have a host of problems with this. First of all, it only goes to show how low the bar is for Dads when the honor of Father of the Year is tossed about with regard to sending your daughter to school with cocaine. I don't care how "meticulously" you handle it. Damn, a Mom sends a kid to school with Tylenol and she gets a call that medicine can't be sent in without a doctor’s note.
And as for the school district spokesman, do you really need to specify in the science fair's rules that a substance that is illegal in the world is banned? Wouldn't that be a given? Or does that mean that someone could come in and cook up some crystal meth as their project as long as the rules don't say meth is banned?
But at the end of the day, as bad as the above are, I think my biggest problem with this is: why did she win first place? The article considers this "not surprising" – I consider it impossible to understand. Here is the last paragraph of the article directly quoted:
“The student’s science project involved a very unusual set of circumstances, including having a parent who is a well-respected police detective with experience in training dogs that sniff for illegal substances," Schuster's statement read. "From our understanding, the parent was the only person involved in working directly with the dogs and the hidden substances, which took place at a police training facility."
She did nothing with regard to this project. Someone else trained the dogs, her Dad handled the coke (and again, how is it that I just made that statement about someone labeled a potential father of the year participating in a school sponsored science project?) and the dogs sniffed it out. Even if the cocaine didn't violate the science fair's rules, wouldn't someone other than the student doing the project violate it? You know how in first grade when they hand out projects, they say “please don’t do this for your child – we want to see first grade work.” I think we can all assume this is an early lesson being taught to carry through the years. Whether you send in an impressionist landscape you painted or a coke-sniffing dog you trained, you did the project not your kid. I also have a problem in that I'm not sure there is any science involved here at all. What is scientific about this? Sounds more like an animal behavior training project to me. With animals that were already trained. Which one can do it the fastest? That's just a race. Comes under sporting event to me.
In fact, to revisit my crystal meth comparison above, if successfully accomplished that to me would be a more appropriate (well, as appropriate as cocaine versus meth in school can be) science fair winning project. Illegal, immoral, whatever - if Breaking Bad has taught me anything, it is that cooking meth is all about the science!
Hey, I understand we are only talking about 10 year olds, but using every fact in this situation as a guideline, as long as that rule book doesn’t say “no meth allowed” if the kid had two meth-cooking parents and as long as the kid didn’t touch anything, she could do a science project as to whose meth came out purest. She would take first place, the Dad could be Father of the Year and the Mom would likely go to jail for endangering a child and bringing drugs to school without a doctor's note.
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