Ad Nauseam
The District of Columbia’s $41,000 anti-truancy ad campaign got off to an embarrassing start when signs containing a typo hit the streets in January. The signs, posted on the sides of 75 city buses, read: “D.C. Public Schools Wants You!!! Go To Class—It’ A Blast!!!” prompting jokes about the value of a capital city education. School officials blamed the printer for the error, and the company replaced the ads at no cost the day after the typo was caught.
Busted Drivers
Tanya Humbert and Kimberly Holsapple, school bus drivers in Albany, New York, have been fired and charged with a misdemeanor after allegedly persuading a 5- year-old boy to urinate into a cup. Holsapple, who told police she had used marijuana, hoped to pass off the boy’s urine as her own in a drug test.
Clean Machine
A substitute teacher was removed from a middle school in Independence, Missouri, in January after cleaning parts of his submachine gun in front of students, The Associated Press reports. The teacher, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, had no bullets with him and did not have enough parts to completely assemble a gun, say Independence police.
Yes, Virginity
Teenagers who make public pledges to delay sexual intercourse until they are married tend to wait longer to have sex than those who do not make so- called “virginity pledges,” a study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill concludes. “Our findings surprised us because we didn’t expect to see any effect,” says Peter Bearman, the lead investigator. The study shows that the effectiveness of pledging depends on students’ ages. Among adolescents ages 18 and older, pledging makes no difference; among 16- and 17- year-olds, pledging delays sex significantly.
