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Wrapping up the year, I find myself with an oversupply of outrages. If I throw them away, I'm afraid I'll be adding to our toxic waste problem. So I offer them here as the Blame & Shame Awards 2007.The "What Were They Thinking?" Award
Mere weeks after the Virginia Tech shooting massacre, staff members of Scales Elementary school in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, dreamed up one of the dumbest pranks of all time: staging a mock gun attack on unsuspecting students. When a group of sixth graders were on a weeklong trip to a state park, teachers told them a gunman was on the loose in the area. Terrified students hid under tables crying while one teacher in a hooded sweatshirt pulled on a locked door. A school official later suggested the event was a learning experience, designed to prepare kids for an emergency, presumably like the one at Virginia Tech.
As one parent said at the time, "The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them." A teacher and an assistant principal were suspended without pay for this stupidity. But they should have been fired. Who knows what they'll do on Friday the 13th.
The Lowest of the Low Award
When members of a Jackson, Michigan, area community learned that 36-year-old Jean Anne Allen had been stricken with liver cancer, they opened their hearts and wallets to help pay for her lifesaving treatment. Local children collected spare change, and co-workers organized a spaghetti dinner. All told, friends and neighbors raised more than $16,000 for the woman.
But police discovered it was all a fraud. Even though she encouraged the fund-raising efforts, Allen never had cancer. She did, however, spend some of the money on medical bills: about $100 of it, which included visits to her dentist and a chiropractor. Police say she blew the rest shopping, paying cell phone bills and making car payments.
Allen pleaded no contest, and in October a judge found her guilty of a felony larceny. In addition to jail time, I hope her sentence includes months of community service: dishing out spaghetti dinners to raise money for cancer victims and their families.
The Look, Don't Touch Award
You've heard of schools banning fighting and sexual contact. But how about no touching-none whatsoever? That's the policy of Joyce Kilmer Middle School in Vienna, Virginia, where all physical contact-from handshakes to high-fives-has been banned. One 13-year-old student was even cited by school officials earlier this year for putting his arm around his girlfriend in a school cafeteria.
With schools around the country already going overboard with zero tolerance policies, the no-touch rule can be hard to enforce and even harder to defend as a smart school mandate.
The "Who's Minding the Store?" Award
What's $265 million among friends? That's what the Pentagon was overcharged by a major defense contractor that was building a new fighter jet. What's really troubling here isn't just the money-although that's pretty shocking on its own. It's that the multimillion-dollar mix-up wasn't even noticed in Washington. It was noticed by the contractor, Lockheed Martin.
Turns out an error in the company's billing system had overcharged the military on 11 separate occasions for work on the fighter jet project. Kudos to the company for owning up to its mistake and paying back the money, with interest, right away. But it's infuriating that no one at the Pentagon caught the overcharge, especially at a time when some of our wounded veterans are having a hard time collecting their disability benefits. Sounds like it's time to hire some military bean counters. In this case, the contractor did the right thing. But how many others might not be so honest?
The Heartless Bureaucracy Award
At about 1 a.m. on May 9, Edith Rodriguez arrived at the emergency waiting room of Los Angeles's Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital with a perforated bowel. Seriously injured and bleeding to death, she needed immediate help. But the staff of the hospital didn't believe she was seriously ill and refused to treat her. A hospital janitor even mopped up around her as she lay on the floor vomiting blood.
Her condition became so dire that her boyfriend and a bystander called 911-yes, from inside the hospital- repeatedly begging for help. But 911 operators didn't seem to care much either. ("You're already at a hospital … It is not an emergency," one operator told the bystander before suggesting she call back on a nonemergency line.)
Rodriguez died that morning, at age 43. After an investigation, a triage nurse on duty at the time was placed on leave. She later resigned but denied any responsibility. The hospital was shut down in August after failing a federal inspection, but county officials hope to reopen it.
The Cruel and Unusual Punishment Award
When pregnant 26-year-old Jessica Hodges began feeling labor pains in July, she jumped into her car. Thinking she was in a race with her baby, the Burke, Virginia, bank teller floored it to the hospital. But it was a false alarm, and she didn't give birth that day.
While she didn't come home with a new child, she did get something else: a $1,050 ticket for driving 57 mph in a 35 zone. Sound crazy? Not under a new Virginia law, created to fund new transportation projects, which has jacked up unsafe driving fines in the state to as high as $3,000. As for Hodges, she failed to convince a judge to reduce the fine. With two small children to support, she told The Washington Post, her husband would likely have to work overtime to pay for the cost.
A woman in labor is better off calling 911, not driving at high speeds. But an excessive fine that pays for greedy politicians' pet projects-in this case, a thousand bucks-turned a driving lesson into a real hardship for this young mother.
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