TRI In The News
Student's Permanent Record at Stake
From One News Now
Original article available here
The Rutherford Institute is defending a North Carolina eighth-grade student who has been suspended and sent to an alternative school program for bringing oregano to school, joking that it was marijuana.
John Whitehead, founder of The Rutherford Institute, says a bag of oregano cannot be properly considered a synthetic or counterfeit drug, so he is asking the school to expunge the charge that the student was trying to distribute an illegal substance.
"This goes on his record forever, if it's not expunged," the attorney explains. "What we find -- and we've been handling these cases since the mid-1990s, with these kind of silly things that kids get into trouble [for] these days -- that when they apply to college later on, they can't get into the college of their choice because they have a drug offense."
Whitehead argues that the 55-day suspension the boy received from Union County Public School officials was excessive and could do more harm than good.
"What we find, and statistics show this, when kids are either put out on the street or expelled from school for long periods of time, they get into trouble in other ways, and we don't want that," he says.
The eighth-grader brought a bag of oregano to school and gave it to a friend as a joke, after the friend spoke of marijuana following a discussion about the drug in health class.
