A high school student in New York said she was practicing ‘civil disobedience’ after she was suspended on her first day of class for bringing a coffee and refusing to throw it out. Julie Kaputa walked into a classroom at Beaver River Central School in Castorland with the beverage on September 3 before receiving the suspension.
Kaputa was slapped with an in-school suspension over her latte, which the school said violated its Code of Conduct regulation that sought to create a “safe, instruction-focused environment for all students”.
“I walked in, I had my coffee with me. I got to my first period class, and my teacher said, ‘I’m either going to need you to dump that out or consume it on the spot, or go down to the office,’ ” Kaputa was quoted as saying by New York Post.
The high school senior said she had another meeting with two members of the administration on the same day. A committee comprising Kaputa, five other students, two teachers, and one of the members of the administration was formed to look further into the matter.
In a social media post, Kaputa detailed that she decided to carry a cup of joe after she and several other students became aware that the school board voted on the new code about the food and drink policy on Aug. 10, which the majority of her senior class disapproved of.
Researching the changes, Kaputa said she discovered that the school had not posted meeting minutes from the previous three Board of Education (BOE) meetings.
“I was able to find a copy of the new code tucked into the August 10th agenda,” Kaputa wrote, “but it did not outline which parts had been changed. As a result of this, I sat down and read through the Code of Conduct. I realised that [the] BOE is required to hold a [separate] Public Hearing to change [the] code of conduct, which they had not done.”
At an open house held the night before the first day of school, Kaputa told her homeroom teacher in advance that she intended to “practice civil disobedience” that day so as to not disrupt the class.
Kaputa said school officials claimed the new regulations were instituted to prevent kids from smuggling in booze or THC drinks.
“Personally, I believe that the point can be disproved simply because the administration was still allowing water bottles to be brought in. You do not know what is in someone’s water bottle,” she said.
The teen said a new proposal will be pitched in a board meeting to revert to the old policy that prohibited ordering food and drinks to the school but did not ban students from bringing them to the school in the morning.
