Samuel Burgos is 8 years old. One day he brought a toy gun to school in his backpack. That got him expelled from his Miami school for two years. Toy guns violate his school district’s zero-tolerance policy for weapons.
The district offered to place Sam in a correctional school; his parents opted to home-school him instead. His father told the local NBC affiliate, “I can’t sit here and allow them to send my kid to a school where students have committed actual crimes,” Burgos said. “He hasn’t committed a crime.”
Sam misses his friends. And he may have to repeat the second grade. All because common sense has gone missing from Broward County’s schools. That’s what makes the school board’s response especially galling:
The school board says it’s common sense to know that this kind of item can’t be allowed on school campus and that responsibility also falls on parents to know what their children have in their backpacks.
The Burgos family has suffered enough. Toy guns are not weapons. They are toys. The school board should exercise a bit of common sense and reinstate Sam immediately.
As I’ve noted before, “South Florida is corrupt and weird.” And just how corrupt and how weird is it?
First, corruption: The New Times, Miami’s alternative weekly, has issued corrupt local politician trading cards, “commemorating those halcyon days when bankruptcy loomed, graft was common, and lawmen busted bad pols like fishermen nail snook in the Keys.” What I find odd is that, given the long litany of corrupt South Florida politicians, they only found room for seven cards.
Now, weirdness: For what may be the first time ever anywhere, this week in Miami a couple of dumb hoodlums tried to sell a stolen shark to a fish market. The shark was apparently alive as they dragged it through the streets — and even took it onto the Metromover, an elevated trolley that runs in a circuit around downtown Miami.
Rob Orta, an employee at Casablanca Fish Market, told television station WSVN that the men offered his business the shark.
“But we don’t buy sharks off the street,” Orta told the station.
Wildlife officials later determined the animal was a nurse shark. The case could result in misdemeanor charges of improper killing and disposal of an animal and selling a shark without a license.
One resident of the area where the shark was dumped said he didn’t know what was going on at first.
“It was a relief that it was a shark,” said Keith Smith. “When I first saw it, I thought it was a body because of all the shootings that have been going on.”
For more on Miami corruption and weirdness see here and here.
(Thanks to Margaret Griffis and Jen Mass for the tips.)
Having grown up in Miami, I find movies and TV shows set there amusing, for irony if nothing else. Laughing at tacky TV and film depictions of Miami should have gotten old for me by now. But whenever it seems like that’s about to happen, Miami-based entertainment takes another strange turn, as Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin writes:
I’m not saying Miami Social is so bad it’s good. I’m saying it’s so bad it will make you regret being born with eyes. I’m saying it’s so bad that if you saw a member of the cast burst into flame on the street, you wouldn’t waste your spit putting him or her out. I’m saying Osama bin Laden, if he sees it, will weep bitter tears of frustration that he went after the wrong American city.
A stupefying concoction of idiotic hubris, faux glamour and neurotic self-absorption, Miami Social purports to follow ”a close circle of seven friends who make this city spin,” including such civic heavyweights as a freelance editor, a freelance photographer, a South Beach party-planner and a real-estate agent who doesn’t know how to figure square-footage costs. (At last! An explanation for the collapse of the South Florida housing market!)
Makes me want to ask Glenn, “What do you really think?” (Thanks to Margaret Griffis for the Herald link.)
For more on Miami strangeness, see here.
Miami has been named the fattest city in America by Men’s Fitness magazine, and its neighboring burg of Hialeah among the nation’s most boring by Forbes. Some double whammy. For my part, having grown up in the area, the dubious honor of these two that I find surprising is not the one the rest of the nation would think about.
Some might ask: “How about all those beaches; isn’t that enough motivation to stay in swimsuit shape?” Well, no, unless you live right next to the beach. Plenty of Miamians rarely go to the beach, much as people in other cities don’t partake in their town’s defining landmarks — as in the cliche of New Yorkers who have never been to the Statue of Liberty. A dietitian interviewed by USA Today blames Miami’s girth on (surprise!) bad diet and lack of exercise, which can occur anywhere, so why not Miami?
Hialeah, on the other hand, is not like other places. The second largest city in Dade County after Miami (a distinction akin to Buffalo being the second largest city in New York State), Hialeah is a place of concrete as far as the eye can see (many lawns are paved over), terrible drivers (even by Miami standards), and incredibly corrupt politics (even by South Florida standards).
Hialeah is home to Raul Martinez, the city’s former mayor, who once won reelection after being convicted of racketeering and extortion, and once wanted Hialeah to become its own county. Incredibly, the man still has a political career; in 2008 he was the Democratic nominee to challenge Republican Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart for his seat, but fell short.
And a town that could inspire this be described as boring?
In the words of one Hialeah resident: “This town could use a little boring.”
For more on Miami politics, see here. (Thanks to Claudia Barrett for the first Herald link and to Margaret Griffis for the USA Today and YouTube links.)
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