An Example or a Warning?

We all send our children off to school by age 5 with a mixture of excitement and foreboding. Hopefully, they will learn to read and write and do math and explore science and create artistic masterpieces. Hopefully, they will not be bullied, or be a bully to others. It’s difficult at first to let our precious children be tutored by someone else who might influence them in a different direction than we would choose.

All the worse when the news reports that someone who is a trusted employee in a school is personally involved with drugs. No doubt he was still a person who would tell the kids not to use them, but it sure doesn’t provide a very good example for them and that’s why it’s not tolerated.

Over in Fairfield, Krista Salvioli, an elementary school psychologist, was charged with crack cocaine possession last week. Her resignation listed only “personal reasons” as a cause, but it’s pretty clear that her involvement with drugs was the reason.

And the possible end of her career all began with a routine traffic stop. Salvioli and her friend Peter Fiore were pulled over because their car had an obstructed license plate. Wow! The car worked fine, and they were driving okay, but this smallest of offenses, which likely would have only brought a warning, led to the traffic stop. No doubt Salvioli and Fiore were not expecting it, and they grew quite nervous and seemed to be hiding something when the officer approached their car. The officer saw a glass pipe in the center console of the vehicle and asked about it, to which she replied, “what pipe?” When the officer told Fiore to get out of the vehicle, he struggled and fell to the ground. Officers found a small glass pipe and some crack cocaine hidden in his sock.

Salvioli was concerned about having an arrest on her record since she is a teacher and knows the consequences of such an action. "This can't happen. I'm a teacher," she reportedly told the officer. Perhaps she should have thought of that before she led her life from being an example to being a warning.