LAKELAND. Fla. — It’s a practiced art among most middle-school boys: passing gas and blaming it on someone nearby.
It has been going on for years, maybe decades — heck, maybe 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 this week and ended up being banned from the bus for three days. 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,” he said Thursday. “I don’t know.”
The 15-year-old attends the Bill Duncan Excel Center, an alternative school in Lakeland. Jonathan denied making the sound on the bus Monday. He said a friend was making fart sounds with his mouth.
That cracked him up, he said. Then came a rank odor, which made the situation hysterical, he said. “I just thought it was funny.”
A day later, when Jonathan walked on 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 that you can’t breathe after he does it,” the bus driver wrote in a disciplinary note levying the three-day suspension.
Jonathan’s father, Jonathan Locke Sr., said the school went a bit too far in the flatulence fracas. He said the ordeal has disrupted his son’s education.
“I don’t know how they can do it, but apparently they can,” Locke Sr. 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.”
Polk County School District officials either declined to talk about the matter or didn’t respond to messages Thursday.
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