Intestinal Fortitude

We see that the students at Chamberlain High School in Hillsborough County, Florida (that’s Tampa to you out-of-towners), have resurrected the time-honored bogus bomb-threat as a way of informally modifying the school’s calendar, particularly near exam time. One might have thought that some portion of the inherent hilarity would have been lost following September 11, but the kids most likely to resort to this tactic are no doubt least likely to read the newspaper, so perhaps they missed it.

It seems that in its latest incarnation, some wag scrawled the threat on the wall of a bathroom last week, and the school was duly evacuated.

County school officials responded with a clever tactic of their own: They closed all but two of the 12 bathrooms normally available for the school’s 2,183 students. Hillsborough County schools spokesperson Linda Cobbe explained:

The policy was enacted to eliminate one of the ways students can make threats, which can disrupt classes for hours. Threats such as the one found at Chamberlain last week are more common during exams, which start Wednesday at Chamberlain, Cobbe said.

"This is just a way to discourage students from getting into mischief in unsupervised bathrooms," she said.

Although school officials view the limited bathroom availability as a way to stop major disruptions, students and parents say it just creates problems during an already stressful time.

Do tell.

One imagines that students (and others) might also make bomb threats written on paper, or called in to the school or police. That would seem to nix paper, pens, pencils and the telephone system, all of which will need to be confiscated or shut down. Not to mention the computer system and email.

But, in the end, this is just another story about The Man: Anyone like to bet on whether or not the restrooms used by the principal and the teachers were shut down? I thought not.

Proof that we don’t make this stuff up: The Tampa Tribune.