By KEITH MORELLI | The Tampa Tribune
and NATALIE SHEPHERD | News Channel 8
Published: March 19, 2009
Updated: 10:37 pm
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LAKELAND - It's a practiced art among most middle school boys: The passing of gas and blaming it on someone sitting next to you.
Farting has been going on for years, maybe decades, heck, maybe even since the dawn of mankind. It's always, well, usually funny. But beware of laughing out loud at farts. It could land you and your sense of humor in the toilet.
Just ask Jonathan Locke Jr., a Polk County eighth grader who got blamed for farting on a school bus earlier this week and ended up being banned from the bus for three days. Actually, it wasn't the farting that resulted in his ouster, it was the disruption that followed, school officials said.
"I guess it was just because I was laughing so hard," Jonathan said Thursday. "I don't know."
The 15-year-old attends the Bill Duncan Excel Center, an alternative school in Lakeland. He denied making the sound on the bus Monday. He said a friend was making flatulent sounds with his mouth.
That cracked him up, he said. Then came the rank odor, which made the situation hysterical, he said.
"I just thought it was funny," he said.
A day later, when he walked onto the bus to go home, he was handed a note telling him he had been barred from the bus for three days.
"Jonathan passes gas on the bus to make the other children laugh and it is so stink (sic) that you can't breathe after he does it," the bus driver wrote in a disciplinary note that contains the three-day suspension sanction.
Jonathan said he walked across the street to where a relative works and his father came and picked him up.
He has had to get rides from his father over the next couple of days. On Thursday, he stayed home from school.
Jonathan Locke Sr. thinks the school went a bit too far in this flatulence fracas and said the whole ordeal has disrupted his son's education.
"I don't know how they can do it, but apparently they can," he said. "They say it's disrupting the bus and they can do whatever they want to if it comes to disrupting the children on the bus."
Locke Sr. admitted that sometimes farts are funny but said the end result here was not funny.
"He's already had enough problems," the elder Locke said. "I'm sure this isn't going to help him overcome the problems he already has."
He said his son told him he was not the passer of the gas on the bus that Monday afternoon.
"I know you can't search somebody for something like that," he said. The teen told his father: 'I didn't even do it … It was really the kid in front of me.' "
Polk County school district officials either declined to talk about the matter or didn't return messages today.