oh good grief...

[acroyear]

Students Aren't Allowed To Touch Real Rocks - Forbes.com:

Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo., had his shipment all ready: A school's worth of small bags, each one filled with an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Then the school canceled its order. Says Warring, "They apparently decided rocks could be harmful to children."

After all, who knows exactly what is in a piece of Mother Nature? There could be a speck of lead!

The children will study a poster of rocks instead.

And so it goes in the unbrave new world, where nothing is safe enough. It's a world brought to us by the once sane, now danger-hallucinating Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Comments

[uncle-possum.livejournal.com]

Sigh--here we go again: Lo these many years ago, when OSHA was first started, farmers in places like Nebraska were fined for not have portpotties in their fields (workers might get infections from the poo, or smell the pee), and cattle and pig farmers were actually fined because they had whole pens with fresh animal poo (workers might slip in the stuff and get hurt). while at the same time, fruit pickers in California were being spayed with DDT while they worked.

When the lead thing first came out, there was a provision which would have closed down most children's departments in libraries (all that lead in the older books' ink). At least that got changed. So there is some hope.

Although based on some other news items about schools, I am not convinced it was CPSC but the local school's suits that are responsible.