Asshole of the Week

For awhile there, it was looking like this column could be retitled "Educators Gone Wild," as one of our winners and a number of our runners-up work(ed) in the Philadelphia area's schools. There was the ecstacy-dealing high school basketball coach, the "abstinence education is the only appropriate sex education" administrators at Archbishop Ryan, the elementary school teacher who wrote threatening messages throughout her school and the pedophile special ed teacher. But it's not just educators who are endangering kids' welfare (and, we should note, by extension, the future of mankind). We'd be remiss if we didn't point out that there are some pretty dreadful parents out there. We're not just talking about the parents who humiliate their children (and themselves) in public. Oh, no. They're just the tip of the iceberg. When we look deeper, we find that there are much, much more disturbing parenting practices out there. Like the Trenton couple who sent their seven-year-old son to school with seventy grams of crack. Our favorite part of the story is that, when the police were searching the parents' house following the discovery of the crack on the kid, two guys showed up to purchase drugs. Oops! The parents had twenty-two grams of crack in the house, which made us wonder – why would they send more crack with their kid than they would keep for themselves? Is the seven-year-old really a better pusher than his parents? But we digress. The kid probably doesn't stand a chance in life, and it makes us sad. So unto his parents (whose names we don't know because authorities are not disclosing the names, so as to protect the boy and his sister), we bestow the title of Parents of the Year Assholes of the Week.

Just one runner-up this week, after the jump.