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A School Made 80 Students Take an Alcohol Test Over One Empty Beer Can

When no one fessed up to bringing booze to the high school football game, administrators gave the kids two hours to get tested or face suspension.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Image via Pixabay

Last Friday, a single beer can tumbled from the student bleachers at a high school football game in Randolph, New Jersey, and landed at the feet of two administrators. One approached the gang of teens sitting in the stands and offered them an ultimatum: Either someone owns up to bringing booze into the game, or everyone takes an alcohol test.

When no one fessed up, school administrators gave all the students in the student section at the Randolph High School game two hours to get their urine and blood tested for alcohol, the Daily Record reports. If they didn't, school officials warned, they'd be slapped with a five day suspension.

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Row by row, the students were reportedly marched into the high school and ushered into classrooms during the game. Administrators handed them off to their parents with a slip of paper mandating that each one had urine and blood work done, forcing their folks to take them to a clinic. Unsurprisingly, parents were pretty pissed.

"Parents were FUMING at this, because they had to take their child to get blood work done at 10 o'clock at night (and were getting fined for it)," Nate Pangaro, the school's student body president, wrote in a public statement. "Parents were complaining to cops, the security team, and the administration, and, at all times, each group gave the same answers."

By the end of the night, around 80 students were tested and fewer than five kids wound up testing positive for alcohol, according to school board candidate Christopher C. Treston, a father or two students who attended the game. He pointed out that parents were forced to flood emergency rooms in four different New Jersey towns with their sober-ass kids, leaving hospital staff totally overwhelmed and confused as to why they had to draw blood from a bunch of teens.

"Our process of preventing backpacks, bottles, and cans from entering the stadium broke down. In addition, some number of students arrived intoxicated," Treston wrote on Facebook. "When the accused-but-innocent outnumber the guilty 16 to one, we probably did it wrong."

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School officials defended the move, saying they found a few more beer cans after spotting the first. Plus, according to Randolph Township Superintendent Jennifer Fano, administrators didn't have much of a choice.

"As educators, we are charged with enforcing policy," Fano wrote in a statement. "The law requires that we send students out to be tested when it appears that they may be under the influence of drugs or alcohol."

That's not much of a consolation to the dozens of parents involved, many of whom had to pay for a test, only to find out that their kids were just innocently hanging out at a football game.

"I was one of the parents who walked into the game with my son only to watch him forced into a seat in the student section and minutes later escorted into the school," parent Dan Law wrote on Facebook. "For a moment forgot [I] lived in the United States of America."

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