Drunk math teacher. At least she’ll understand .205 BAL.
And, because we’ve missed so many issues this year and, well, because this one’s too good to pass up, a BONUS alcoholic Antic-of-the-Month:
“Calculate the Odds of this Catching up with Her: A student at Poston Butte High School in San Tan Valley, Ariz., complained a math teacher was drunk in her classroom. The principal and school police officer investigated, and Kathleen Jardine, 57, allegedly admitted she had been drinking the night before, that morning, and during lunch at school; her blood alcohol measured .205 percent, the Pinal County sheriff’s office reported. A half-empty, 750 ml bottle of vodka was found in her purse, along with an empty wine bottle. The night before, Jardine was arrested for drunk driving on her way home from school. It was about an hour after she left work, and her blood alcohol was .257 percent — high enough to classify the crime as a ‘Super Extreme DUI.’ Deputies found a half-empty bottle of peppermint schnapps in her car, and asked if she was drinking and driving. ‘I only drank it when I was stopped,’ she replied. During her field sobriety test, the math teacher was counting her steps out loud and suddenly stopped to ask the officer, ‘Did I run out of numbers?’ Jardine was fired three years ago from a previous job — teaching math at a high school in New Mexico — because students complained she was drunk in her classroom. She passed a background check before she was hired in Arizona. (RC/KTVK Phoenix) …Maybe background checks should also include a quick Google search.”
The trouble with a Google search is that not only are problems hidden deep in Google’s search engines, but also too often drinking is not seen as relevant and, therefore, goes unreported. A diagnosis of alcoholism in a teacher—and a .257 percent blood alcohol content qualifies—should result in automatic choice of dismissal or being subject to regular and random alcohol and other-drug tests for years, if not for the rest of a teaching career. With ankle bracelets and other technology behind it, this would result in far more sober teachers. And because this sort of excess is only the tip of the iceberg—there’s no question that for every Kathleen Jardine there are ten or twenty others hiding it—those who teach children should be subject to regular and random testing and occasional screening for substance addiction. Hey, we can dream, can’t we?
(Stories and taglines from “This is True,” copyright 2014 by Randy Cassingham, used with permission. If you haven’t already subscribed to his newsletter—the free one at least, or the paid one I get, with more than twice the stories—I highly recommend it: www.ThisIsTrue.com.)