‘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.
Several hundred senior students, including the unnamed girl, have been in lockdown at the school since late September.
They are preparing for next year’s college entrance exams, which can decide the future of Chinese students, the school principal, surnamed Wei, told Dafeng News.
Her family passed the pancakes to her by climbing up a wall behind her dormitory using a ladder. After delivery, she sold them to her schoolmates, said Wei.
“We didn’t call the police. We just wanted to bring it to the attention of parents and other students by expelling her,” he added.
However, within hours the school reversed their decision and asked the student to resume her classes the next day, a move taken after the county government intervened amid widespread public ridicule and criticism of the initial decision.
“The school should just have given her a warning. A family that is doing OK financially wouldn’t let the child do this,” said one netizen on Weibo.
“Where does the school cafeteria get their supply from? Isn’t it bought from shops outside the campus? Can this cause the spread of Covid then?” Another asked.
Daxiang News, Henan Television’s new media platform, described the punishment as a “trumped-up charge” that could damage the teenager’s future at a critical time.
“They can’t expel a senior high school student just because of some virus that didn’t exist on campus. It would be a real tragedy if she can’t sit the college entrance exam and miss the life-changing opportunity after spending more than 10 years studying,” it said in a commentary on Friday.
