Florida Teen Charged With Felony After Harmless Science Experiment Gone Wrong

Curiosity killed the cat, but apparently, it's also a felony in the town of Bartow, FL. A teenage girl there could now be facing upwards of 5 years in prison for performing an unauthorized experiment that went awry.

The student, 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot, was a student at Bartow High School but has since been expelled after she mixed toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil together in a small plastic bottle as part of a science experiment. The resulting reaction was enough to pop the cap off of the bottle, and there was a small amount of fumes.

"Honestly, I don't think she meant to ever hurt anyone," Principal Ron Pritchard said. "She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked too."

Wilmot was in good standing academically with the school and had an otherwise clean record. She has been described as a good kid with stellar grades and no prior criminal record. Furthermore, nobody was hurt during the experiment and no school property was damaged.

"The criminal justice paradigm, under which zero tolerance operates, strips educators of decision-making powers and discretion," observes Dr. Kathleen Nolan, the author of 'Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School.' "It forces otherwise caring and thinking adults to respond to incidents in unthinking and often destructive ways."

In this case, those "caring and thinking adults" have now elected to expel Wilmot for the rest of her high school career, and now she must defend herself against felony charges of detonating a weapon on school property. Critics are quick to note that Wilmot is not the only one.

"It's emblematic of a national issue," said Bro/Sis Executive Director Khary Lazarre-White. "Over three million cases of expulsion and severe suspensions across the country, and it's a zero tolerance policy that is expelling children for the kinds of things that got us sent to the principal's office or talked to by a teacher, at worst, when we were in school."

Wilmot has insisted that she thought the experiment would just cause some smoke to form, and had no intention of harming anyone. Despite the principal's siding with Wilmot, her school district has maintained her expulsion in order "to maintain a safe and orderly learning environment."