‘She smuggled pancakes over a wall’: online backlash forces school to back down over expulsion of student who sneaked deep-fried treats into locked-down campus
- Deep-fried pancake business of student’s family had hoped to make clandestine sales into a locked-down school campus
- Local government officials ordered the school to reverse the decision to expel the girl amid widespread public anger
An online backlash has forced a school in northwestern China to reverse a decision it took to expel a student for selling homemade pancakes “smuggled” onto a campus which was under Covid-19 lockdown.
The teenage student – who is in her last year at The Third High School of Huining County, in Gansu province – was handed the punishment after she took clandestine delivery of deep-fried pancakes from her family over a school wall.
Details of the pancake-smuggling operation were announced in an internal school memo sent on Tuesday which immediately went viral online.
The girl’s family makes pancakes for a living and wanted her to sell them on campus.
However, the school has banned students from leaving its environs and family visits are prohibited for Covid-19 control purposes.
The memo said her behaviour had breached the school’s “repeated anti-Covid policies” and “posed an extremely big threat to the health of all teachers and students in school”. No-one subsequently tested positive for the virus.