Tinton Falls Girl Finds Cymbalta Pills in Breakfast Cereal

Tinton Falls, NJ - An 11-year-old Tinton Falls girl found two antidepressant pills in cereal she had purchased from the school cafeteria at Swimming River Elementary School last Wednesday. But how the school handled the incident is what really made her mother enraged.

That morning, before class, the girl opened her cereal container and got up to throw the plastic wrapper in the trash, her mother, Freehold resident Calvette Dixon, told Patch. When she got back to her table, she found two pills mixed in with the cereal. The girl told a nearby teacher, who put the pills back in the cereal and told the girl to return the product to the counter. The girl did, and was given a new cereal box, but she did not feel comfortable eating it, her mother said.

The pills turned out to be 60 mg doses of the generic for Cymbalta, used to treat depression.

“60 milligrams is really high. If she had poured milk in there, they would have dissolved. She could have gotten really sick or even died,” said Dixon. “And the teacher gave the pills back to my daughter? And they kept the cereal boxes stacked up for sale? Shouldn’t everyone have been warned about this?”

Vice principal told girl perhaps another student doesn’t like her, mom says

It only got worse from there, Dixon said. She received a call from the school’s vice principal at around 11 a.m. Wednesday, notifying her that her daughter had found two pills in her cereal. Dixon said she was so concerned she went straight to the school.

“Breakfast is served from 8 to 8:30 a.m. and I didn’t get a call until 11 a.m. I said to them, ’Why am I just now being notified of this? And did you call the police?’”

The vice principal said the school was not going to call police, Dixon said.

“I was told, ’We’re not going to do that; we don’t want to accuse any kids,’” she said. “I said it’s drugs in an elementary school; the police should have been notified.”

“At one point, the vice principal also implied to my daughter that maybe it was one of the other kids who did it,” Dixon said. “She said things like, maybe someone doesn’t like you, you can’t trust kids, and said that she personally doesn’t leave her wine unattended until it’s finished. I mean, what? How can you say that to a kid?”

The vice principal told her she was welcome to file a complaint with the police herself and Dixon said she would do that.

“That’s when she started telling me to, ’calm down, calm down,’ and saying we did you a courtesy calling you, otherwise you would find out at 3 p.m. when your daughter got home from school. If I found out at 3 p.m. about this, I would have been really upset!” Dixon said.

Pills may have been in cereal packaging

School officials told Dixon the pills may have been in the cereal packaging, and they emailed the packaging company. Meanwhile, all the cereal boxes should have been taken down, which they were not, she said.

She did file a complaint on her own with the Tinton Falls Police Department on Wednesday, but she didn’t hear back from the police officer assigned to her case until Friday — after she went to the Asbury Park Press with her story.

“The police never went to the school on Wednesday,” she said. “The police and the school didn’t do anything until I got the media involved.”

Dixon said she and her daughter have been so upset by this that she’s kept the girl home from school for the past few days. She thinks both the teacher who gave the pills back to her daughter, and the vice principal should be disciplined for their actions. So far, however, the school won’t tell her if they have been.

Repeated calls to Tinton Falls Schools Superintendent John Russo by Patch were not returned Wednesday.