Brickbat: A Great Adventure

Two assistant principals at I.S. 24 middle school in Staten Island have been fined $25,000 each for keeping free tickets to the Great Adventure amusement park that had been donated to needy students. Derric Borrero and Richard Gilberto kept $20,000 in tickets for themselves and passed them out to family, friends, and other faculty members instead of to students at the school. They were caught when Borrero's brother sold some of the tickets he was given and a Great Adventure employee matched the serial numbers to ones that had been given away.

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Comments

[db]

Great way to start the day.

[Pound. Head. On. Desk.]

Yep. Just affirms all the warm, fuzzie-wuzzies we all feel, huh?

[Brian D]

Stealing from students is apparently not heinous enough to get them fired.

[Fluffy]

OK, this is pretty bad, but it's ever so slightly teeny tinyily less bad than the article makes it sound.

My kid's school is hardly for needy kids, and they gave out these tickets, too.

The tickets aren't really some kind of charitable donation. They're a marketing promotion. If your kid reads X books, they get a ticket. They get ONE ticket, and then their parents have to buy TWO tickets to take them to the park.

So giving them a cash value is like assigning a cash value to coupons equal to their face value. It's a bit of an exaggeration.

What these guys did is a little like working at a supermarket and waking up Monday morning and taking all the unused coupons from the Sunday newspapers that didn't sell and using them yourself or giving them to your crazy coupon lady neighbor. Yeah, it's kinda a crappy thing to do, but you aren't really stealing the face value of the coupons.

[Night Elf Mohawk]

So how much, in your opinion, did they really steal?

[EDG reppin' LBC]

That may well be true. These guys got a pretty stiff fine, too. But it is a legit story in that the same people who always scream, "It's for the children!!!" conduct themselves in a way that would indicate the contrary. School administration and teachers are looking out for their own interests, and only care about "the children!!!" when it serves their own selfish purposes.

[NeonCat]

See, they were helping poor children by not giving them the opportunity to be disappointed when their parents/guardians couldn't afford the full price tickets to use the promotion. They just look like scumbags.

[DantoRang]

Yup, I'll buy that. Makes a lot of sense dude.

http://www.Anon-Surfer.tk