The conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t eat or drink anything that students might leave for you. Paranoid? Perhaps.
Perhaps not – when fifth graders are involved. The Charleston Post and Courier reports:
Sixteen fifth-graders met with a police investigator Tuesday and answered questions relating to the poisoning of a Boulder Bluff Elementary School [in Goose Creek, SC] teacher who fell ill in class earlier this month, school officials said.
The four questions dealt generally with the circumstances surrounding the Nov. 16 incident, which is thought to have resulted after the teacher ingested methanol and a chemical [ethylene glycol] found in antifreeze.
That’s quite a poisonous brew. The lethal dose for either ethylene glycol or methanol is about a hundred milliliters. In other words, drinking about a quarter of a soda can of either substance could kill you.
And if you don’t die from the stuff, you will not have a pleasant day. From the MSDS sheets,
[Methanol can cause] headache, drowsiness, nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, blindness, coma, and death.
[Ehtylene glycol can cause] CNS depression, vomiting, headache, rapid respiratory and heart rate, lowered blood pressure, stupor, collapse, and unconsciousness with convulsions. Death from respiratory arrest or cardiovascular collapse may follow.
Nasty stuff.
From the article, it appears that students are possible suspects in the poisoning.
‘It’s terrifying,’ Stiles [a mother of one of the 5th graders] said. ‘If it was a child in the teacher’s class who did it, it scares me that someone who is 10 or 11 years old would know how to mix those substances and do that.’
Actually, it’s not that hard to mix those two very common chemicals together. Both mix very well with water and are colorless. Methanol has a characteristic odor, but ethylene glycol doesn’t.
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Getting the teacher to ingest the mixture would be more difficult than concocting it, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
That said, this particular school has been having other problems. I hope the police have a few adult suspects.
This is the same town where, years ago, I witnessed a plot amongst fourth graders to get a teacher fired…
Was observing a wild, wild class as a teacher cadet (TC) in high school, when the students were just being plain defiant, annoying, loud, and not following any directions at all.
Teacher storms out to get the principal, leaving myself and another TC there, wide-eyed and clueless.
The students conspire to get very quiet, start working, and look perfect so the principal will “think the teacher is crazy and get her fired.”
Lovely, and, yes, I am a product of some Goose Creek, SC schools. What a proud day!