Teen sent home from school in Leeds after selling squirts of hand sanitiser for 50p to students during virus outbreak

A teenager has been sent home from school for selling hand sanitiser squirts to other students
BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images
Bonnie Christian12 March 2020

A teenager was sent home from school after he was caught charging other students 50p for a squirt of hand sanitiser during the coronavirus outbreak.

In a post on Facebook, the boy’s mother Jenny Tomkins, from Leeds, shared a photo of her son arriving home from school at 10.53am on Wednesday.

She wrote he had been sent home for the day after charging pupils for shots of sanitiser so they could protect themselves from the virus.

Ms Tompkins added that it was hard to discipline his behaviour when his dad phoned him from work to “say he was a legend.”

She said her son had made £9 and has used some of the money to buy a multipack of Doritos and is saving the rest to buy a kebab.

The post has since gone viral on Facebook with nearly 100,000 comments, many of which praise the boy’s entrepreneurship.

Dixons Unity Academy told the Standard they do not comment on individual cases but added that no student has “ever been excluded for selling hand sanitiser.”

Last week, visitors at a hospital in the midlands had ripped hand sanitiser bottles from walls and stolen the gel to top up their own supplies.

Retailers reported a huge demand for the product, which has emptied shelves at swathes of pharmacies and supermarkets.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK has now reached 460 , after the biggest rise in a single day.

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