Intolerability of zero tolerance laws
Every few weeks comes a tale from one school or another so unbelievably stupid that it makes one shudder with disbelief at the lack of judgment in the administration of the American education system. We should collectively ask whether the people we designate to teach and look after our children most of their daylight hours have ever been tested for common sense. The answer would be obvious.
What in the world am I talking about? Well, it is called zero tolerance and it treats every incident no matter how innocent or incidental or actually threatening the same. It is as if the Queen of Hearts has taken over the school and is constantly shouting, “Off with their heads!”
The latest example of this disreputable policy instituted in a number of school districts around the nation to prevent such actual incidents of chaos as the Columbine High School tragedy is so pathetic that it utterly discredits the practice by doing more harm than the damage it is designed to avoid. It would be almost laughable if it weren’t so tragically flawed.
Until a public outcry forced his school board to back down, a six-year-old boy in Delaware faced 45 days in reform school because he had the temerity to bring his new Cub Scout all-in-one knife, fork and spoon rig to school so he could eat lunch with it. He was so anxious to be a Cub he just had to try it out. It might as well have been a lethal switchblade or a hatchet under zero tolerance and in the eyes of those “educators” who administer it. The boy’s age and intentions were irrelevant.
The young man was forced to appear with two adults who could testify to his character during a hearing on his appeal to be forgiven. The mental giants, presumably including his principal, were told among other things that he was so fond of school he insisted at times on wearing a coat and tie, obviously making him a person of interest to the same kind of authorities who the Supreme Court recently decided had violated the constitutional rights of a seventh-grade girl when they strip searched her over ibuprofen pills under a similar policy. She didn’t have any pills.
According to press accounts, some in Delaware think that officials should have case-by-case discretion in applying the law and a bill was introduced in the state legislature to accomplish that. But apparently it was too radical an idea. The incident that prompted the proposal involved a third-grade girl whose grandmother baked a birthday cake for her class and unthinkingly sent a knife along to cut it. The teacher called the principal to report the girl but not until after she (the teacher) used the knife to cut the cake. Now that is really being practical. One wonders if she got a raise for such ingenuity.
Examples of the absence of common sense go on and on under this policy. More and more parents are opting for home schooling rather than subject their youngsters to such arbitrary discipline that at best can result only in suspension and at worst long term expulsion. Taking the discretion out of the policy apparently came about because of studies showing that African American youngsters were being more severely disciplined for the same offense. In typical educator fashion, a solution to this abhorrent discrimination was to apply the policy wholesale rather than attempting to actually bring equity for everyone into the situation.
There is no question that teachers and principals in many districts have their hands full with discipline. But dealing with children at the elementary school level requires them to recognize that a child is a child and if he turns in a knife, as one youngster did, after finding it in his backpack where he had left if after a hiking trip, he was doing the right thing and should be rewarded for his honesty and diligence rather than being suspended as he was.
But that would require an element of horse sense in a world where it is becoming increasingly obvious there is none.
E-mail Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service, at thomassondan@aol.com.