January 13, 1999

By Michelle Galley

Pencil sharp

A sharp 10-year-old student in New York state recently found an unintended message on his pencil that left the distributor scrambling to erase the blunder.

Kodi Mosier, a 4th grader at the 450-student Ticonderoga Elementary School, received a pencil that read "Too Cool to Do Drugs" from the local police department at a drug-awareness program this past fall.

But when the pencil was sharpened, the first words were eliminated, changing the message to read "Cool to Do Drugs" and then just "Do Drugs."

The boy notified the police, suggesting that they reverse the direction of the message so that "Too Cool" started at the eraser end of the pencil.

Police officials forwarded the letter to the Bureau for At-Risk Youth, the company that supplied the pencils.

Ed Werz, the president of the Plainview, N.Y.-based distributor of drug- and violence-prevention products, said although about 100,000 of those pencils were sold, the 4th grader was the only one who alerted the company about the problem.

For that, the company has decided to follow Kodi's suggestion and also make him an unofficial monitor of their products.

© 1999 Editorial Projects in Education