Girl charged with felony after experimenting with chemistry

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I know this has happened to people on this forum, and I doubt this girl is on the spectrum, but I think she is being treated harshly in part because she is a minority. That being said, these kinds of zero-tolerance policies affect everyone with an inquisitive mind: while she certainly should have been more careful, I think felony charges and expulsion of a good student is incredibly excessive.

Thought maybe the scientific community here might get involved, here's more info:

http://www.wtsp.com/news/reporter/artic ... t-gone-bad

Both Change.org and Causes have petitions in her support if you have no other ideas on how to help:

https://www.change.org/petitions/the-ba ... era-wilmot

http://www.causes.com/scienceisnotafelony?

From what little I know of the case, it seems as though race is playing a role in the harshness of her punishment, but this was an utterly stupid "experiment" to perform without permission from a teacher. She essentially built a bomb (albeit not a particularly lethal one), and although I highly doubt she had malicious intent, she should have realized that there was no way that this could be considered acceptable.

Also, someone, herself included could have been hurt. And that's why I'm not so sure that I agree with the whole "this is discouraging inquisitive minds" claims that people are making about this incident. Safety is a pretty integral part of scientific experiments, and when I was in high school, every chemistry class I took involved having to sign a paper with a nice long list of safety rules and a lame decades-old video about lab safety replete with horrible puns and poor production values. Saying that setting off a tiny two-liter plastic bottle bomb is being "inquisitive" is highly misleading. If a kid in a chemistry class just started randomly pouring chemicals into a beaker to see what happened, and without teacher permission, I guess you could say it was inquisitive, but the first word that would come to mind would probably be stupid. Suffice to say, this girl should have known better.

At the end of the day, I really do feel sorry for this girl if she did indeed just want to see what would happen if she attempted this experiment (and I expect that she's probably telling the truth on this count). She made a really dumb mistake, but I feel like she's going to have this following her around for years, and her punishment seems excessive. It doesn't seem fair that her future has been ruined to a great extent just because she did something stupid, but relatively harmless at school. And if race is indeed playing a role in the severity of her punishment (which it seems like it might), then that's absolutely disgusting.

I would agree that even inquisitive dangerous behavior needs to be treated as such - although there is a degree to which the YouTube videos on this don't look different than a number of experiments we've tried at our house (e.g. Mentos fountain, Alka-seltzer rockets) some of which are on the NASA website. You are right that she should have checked with an adult first, but how many kids make baking soda "bombs: without asking?

That being said, for a good student to be lead away from school in handcuffs, expelled, and charged with a felony is beyond excessive, especially in a situation where no one was hurt. A point made by a poster on another forum - she may simply have been looking for an open area where she could try this relatively safely (in that she may not have a backyard) and not realized that school ground carry zero-tolerance policies.

Point is that this young woman did something wrong - but may well be trading her future for a single, stupid mistake that didn't hurt anyone. Should she have been reprimanded by the school? Certainly. Should she have been suspended and had privileges revoked for the remainder of the year? Maybe. Should police have investigated? Probably.

Handcuffs? Adult felony charges with a possible 5-year prison sentence? Wild overreaction and offensive in my book.

I wish that these articles would mention what chemicals she was experimenting with, since that is really the pivotal point of the entire story. There are certain chemicals she could have mixed that would fully warrant the expulsion and felony charge, whereas there are others that shouldn't even warrant so much as a slap on the wrist. Just saying that there was a cloud of smoke and a tiny "explosion" really says nothing about whether the experiment was potentially hazardous or not.

P.S.: Mixing the wrong chemicals together can be dangerous, folks! You'd be surprised how many experts make similar mistakes all the time. Also in this case I think it's pretty clear that this girl had absolutely no malicious intent and just made a bad decision on her project, she's just another victim of bad school policy.

Several articles mentioned it was drain cleaner (hcl) and aluminum foil in a closed plastic water bottle. The recipe is all over the internet; it's a fairly dangerous one as it can produce caustic smoke (it creates flammable hydrogen, but may also aerosolize the aluminum chloride that is the other part of the reaction, or possibly also release some chlorine gas.)

Most of the YouTube videos describing this reaction say only "do this outside," but don't detail the danger. Considering it doesn't look that different from totally innocuous experiments involving household items that create strong reactions when mixed, I can see where kid might think this experiment is safer than it is.

So, I'd say this was in the world of hazardous, though it doesn't say how much she used (the water bottle in the news report is one of the tiny ones, which one would assume means she didn't use a lot of either the liquid or the foil.) Point is, she didn't hurt anyone nor did she appear to be intending to hurt anyone - and it seems from the police report like she took some (possibly not sufficient) precautions to make sure that nobody was around.

Just another example of how broken schools are.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck_3JHvRQ8w[/youtube]

really racism???

Do you think that a corresponding affluent white male student would have gotten the same treatment? It's either endemic racism in a primarily African-American school (I can't find the demographics online, FLA board of ed site is awful - but, meaning that the zero-tolerance policy is due to perceptions about the student body because of race) or it's specific racism in this case.

Don't get me wrong, creating a large explosion and destroying property, potentially releasing dangerous gases - bad. Very bad. Definitely there should be something done - but keep in mind that this was, according to news reports, a significantly smaller bottle than most of the YouTube videos show. Only one teacher who happened to be on the other side of the building even heard the noise.

Had this been more serious, or had someone actually been hurt, I could see a stronger reaction by authorities (although a felony strikes me as still being out there.)

Also, this: http://raniakhalek.com/2013/05/02/prose ... e-brother/

Unless she screamed:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2s0l9A1NEY[/youtube]
...then the punishment is excessive for just a stupid, "what if I mix these household chemicals" experiment that likely would've only hurt herself.

If there was no criminal intent in doing the experiment, how can criminal charges be brought. At worst, the kids parents should pay for any damage done. It purely a tort, not a felony.

ruveyn

What is interesting is the extent to which the government has been clamping down on home chemistry sets over the last several years. Many scientists can reportedly trace their earliest interest to the quite capable chemistry sets they received as a birthday or Christmas present. The chemistry sets available in the US now are reported to be pretty much useless for learning much of anything.

Thus killing little kids’ interest in chemistry, so they never perform experiments such as this. Problem solved!