High School Student Suspended for Taking One Extra Chicken Nugget at Lunch

Carson Koller sounds like a good kid. He's an Eagle Scout, captain of the drumline at his Tennessee high school, and, in the words of his mom, an "all-around hardworking and well-rounded teenager."

He just happens to like chicken nuggets. Is that a sin?

We think not.

But someone at Carson's high school evidently believes chicken nugget gluttony is a no-no right up there with cutting class to smoke weed behind the bleachers between first and second periods. Not that we ever did such a thing.

Yup, Carson Koller was suspended from school for putting six chicken nuggets on his lunch tray instead of the high school's standard lunch serving of five chicken nuggets. (Did we mention that we fucking hated high school?)

To take indignity to a previously unseen level, this all went down even though the high school lunchroom mistakenly charged Carson three times for the meal: Once before the sixth nugget debacle was uncovered, once more for that ill-fated nugget, and then once again—no one knows why.

Carrie Koller Waller, Carson's mom, took to Facebook and cried injustice. She said she was told by high school officials that "somewhere in the Knox County Handbook there is something to the effect" that kids can be suspended for taking extra food without paying for it.

Waller was having none of it: "It's food. FOOD!!! Not weapons. Not drugs. Not alcohol. Not cheating on a test. Not inappropriate clothing or profanity. Not fighting. Not calling in threats. Not vandalism."

Stating that she was unsure what to do, "laugh, punish, argue, dress him up as a nugget bandit, or let it go," Waller understandably worried about that most dreaded of all high school documents: the permanent record. She wrote, "Does the suspension matter on his records?"

As one would imagine, she got plenty of sympathy from other moms—and other generally sane human beings—following her post.

Thankfully, good sense reigned supreme and, in the end, Carson's suspension was "quickly lifted" after the school principal got a letter from Carson's mom. It turned out that Carson only missed part of his first class on Monday of this week.

Is there a lesson to be learned from the sad story of Carson and his surplus chicken nugget?

Yes, friends: Count your nuggets henceforth, because we all know that there's a back door to the high school that no one watches and a space between the bleachers and the field that is blocked from view.

But hiding a chicken nugget in the lunchroom? Not so easy, friends. Not easy at all.