Orange You Glad This Woman Was Suspended?

Know what’s great about being a student in the Philadelphia public school system? No, it’s not the classes, or the teachers, or the schools named after such luminaries as Thomas Edison and George Washington.

The real reason it’s great to be in the Philadelphia public school system is if a food service worker throws out a crate of oranges because they’re brown, white and covered with green spots, the principal of the school will pull them out of the dumpster and feed them to children. Then the food service worker will be suspended and transferred to another school. Allegedly, at least.

Yes, 18-year district veteran Loretta Allen said she threw out the crate of oranges — and three more crates just like it — after seeing what terrible shape they were in. But the school district said she just didn’t want to cut up the 500 oranges for the students, because, well, after 18 years sometimes you just get mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore.

Of course, the school district admitted that some of them might have been white and green and brown, but that not all of them were, and so throwing them all away was just simply unacceptable, as it’s a school district policy to make the children eat green oranges or something.

The worker’s only real mistake, her union says, was not calling her supervisor before she threw out the oranges. But the district didn’t agree, and she’s been suspended for three days and transferred from her West Kensington elementary school to Shallcross, a disciplinary school.

There, she’ll feed the children bottlecaps and bolts:

Allen said she also had become increasingly concerned about the quality of the food and had reported to superiors on a few occasions in the past about items - including bottle caps, screws and bolts - found in large containers of food.

Discarding oranges gets school worker in trouble [Inquirer]