Last updated : November 11, 2024
I feel very comfortable saying that the decision by Washington High School administrators and staff to hand out prescription pill bottles filled with candy marshmallows to a group of preschoolers was, at best, an epic lapse of judgment.
A child of that age (4-5 years old) does not possess the reasoning to understand why it’s OK to eat something from one prescription pill bottle but not another. When an “authority figure” hands a preschool-aged child a prescription pill bottle filled with candy and tells them it’s safe to eat, they are almost begging for a tragedy to occur.
As parents, we take certain precautions to keep our children safe, such as teaching them to stay away from chemicals and medicine. This gimmick just undid all of that.
Predictably, parents were outraged. Equally as predictable, officials were indifferent.
When Superintendent Rik Goodright learned of the growing concern, he blew it off by making a quick post on the Massillon City Schools Facebook page. His comment read, in part: “The goal was for them to participate in hands-on activities as a fun way to learn about different careers. One of the classrooms they visited was our pharmacy program. As a way to show them what a pharmacist does and as a math activity, the students counted out marshmallows. In no way were we encouraging students to eat anything out of pill bottles. This was a 15-minute lesson out of a two-hour program, which we design to be a fun, hands-on learning experience.”
The fact that the Superintendent can’t understand why this is a problem is both shocking and terrifying. These are the individuals we are forced to entrust our children with for roughly seven hours a day, five days a week, yet they can’t seem to grasp that actions have consequences.
America’s public school system thinks it’s totally necessary to suspend students over stupid things like supposedly biting a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, because the mere mention of a gun will cause millions to die a tragic death or something. But hey, let’s hand out candy in prescription pill bottles and normalize drug abuse, because there clearly isn’t a problem with that. Except for the fact that over 48 million people 12 and older have abused prescription drugs in the US. Or the fact that drug overdose was the leading cause of death in 2010 and has continued to climb.
But if an innocent child dies because they ate mommies prescription pain pills, thinking it was the candy they got from school, I guess that’s just the price we pay so that some school employee can flex their creative muscle and try to be clever.
