OpinionJournal - Featured Article
Dan Richard Beto
ICC_DRB@shsu.edu
Fri, 18 May 2001 06:38:36 -0500
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<img src="http://images.opinionjournal.com/images/header_todaysfeatured.gif" alt="Today's Featured Article" width=245 height=33 hspace=0 vspace=0 border=0><br /><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2><p><font face="Verdana" color="#993300" size=2><b>LUNATIC LESSONS</b></font><br>
<br><font face="Garamond, Times" size=5><b>'Zero Tolerance' Makes Zero Sense</b></font>
<br><font face="Garamond, Times" size=4>School discipline goes mad.</font>
<br><font face="Verdana, Times" size=2><br><b>BY JAMES TARANTO</b>
<br><i>Friday, May 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT</i>
<p>Quick: Name an issue that unites the liberal American Civil Liberties Union and
the conservative Rutherford Institute. The answer is "zero tolerance," the lunatic
policy under which schools across America are suspending, expelling and even jailing
kids for the most trivial of offenses, all in the name of preventing another Columbine.
<p> On May 4, the ACLU won a temporary restraining order on behalf of Kara Williams,
a 16-year-old freshman at Rio Rancho High School, near Albuquerque, N.M. Ms.
Williams had the misfortune of being out of class at a time when two other girls
were suspected of smoking marijuana in the girls' room. She was summoned to
the principal's office, where a security guard searched her bag. She had no
pot, but the guard did find a key chain, attached to which was a tiny penknife,
complete with tweezers, toothpick and a one-inch blade.
<p> Under the school's zero-tolerance weapons policy, Ms. Williams was suspended
for the remainder of the school year--some 45 days. Five weeks later, federal
judge Bruce Black ordered the school to readmit Kara pending the outcome of
the case; last week the school board effectively reduced her sentence to time
served.
<p> But the allegation of "carrying a deadly weapon" will remain on her record,
unless Judge Black rules otherwise. Deadly? Ms. Williams's stepfather told KOAT-TV
that he brought a similar penknife to the federal courthouse, where a security
officer "looked at it and didn't think nothing of it. Went through the metal
detector, gave it back to me and said, 'Go on.' "
<p> <img src="http://opinionjournal.com/best/soldier.jpg" width="206" height="283" align="right">The
Rutherford Institute, meanwhile, has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of nine-year-old
Raleigh "Trey" Walker III, suspended for drawing weapons. That's <i>drawing</i>--as
in illustrating, sketching, depicting. In March, Trey, a third-grader at Lenwil
Elementary School in West Monroe, La., drew a picture of a soldier holding a
knife--a tribute, his father said, to a relative in the Army. Principal Edward
Davis put Trey on "in-school suspension" for a day, saying he found the picture
upsetting. (You be the judge; it's reproduced nearby.) "We can't tolerate anything
that has to do with guns or knives," Mr. Davis told the Monroe News-Star.
<p> Willie Isby, director of child welfare and attendance for the Ouachita Parish
school system, added that "the punishment is not that bad in this case, in light
of the fact that we have been having all these killings in schools." Mr. Isby
also vowed to suppress "copycat drawings." Meanwhile Trey's father, Raleigh
Walker II, told the News-Star, "I had to explain to him that owning guns and
being in the Army is not bad."
<p>
<p align="center"> <img src="/images/storyend_dingbat.gif" alt="" width=88 height=6 hspace=0 vspace=0 border=0 align=center>
</p>
Since March, when I began following zero-tolerance for the "Best of the Web Today"
feature of OpinionJournal.com, I've read dozens of news
stories about outrageously stupid acts of school discipline. (I'm grateful to
OpinionJournal's readers for tipping me off to many of them.) A complete <a href="http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95000486">archive</a>
is available, but here's a sampling:
<p> • Last week an 11-year-old fifth-grader in Oldsmar, Fla., was hauled
out of class in handcuffs for drawing pictures of weapons. "The children were
in no danger at all," Oldsmar Elementary Principal David Schmitt acknowledged
in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times. "It involved no real weapons."
But school-district spokesman Ron Stone told the Times that handcuffing is "normal
procedure in a situation like this."
<p> • A 16-year-old girl was suspended for 10 days from Pau-Wa-Lu Middle
School in Gardnerville, Nev., for compiling a list of classmates who "frustrated"
her. "We don't want a school shooting in our county, and we would rather err
on the side of student safety," principal Robbin Pedrett told the Associated
Press--even though the girl had no access to weapons.
<p> • In Stuart, Fla., a nine-year-old second-grader was arrested and charged
with aggravated assault--a felony--after he allegedly pointed a toy gun at a
classmate at J.D. Parker Elementary School. Earlier, two eight-year-olds at
the Augusta Street School in Irvington, N.J., were charged with "making terrorist
threats" after playing cops and robbers with "paper guns." (Prosecutors later
dropped the charges.) And in Jonesboro, Ark., eight-year-old Christopher Kissinger
was suspended from South Elementary School for three days for pointing a boneless,
breaded chicken finger at a teacher and saying, "Pow, pow, pow."
<p> What accounts for this madness? Why are schools so wildly overreacting to,
or even criminalizing, ordinary juvenile behavior? The specter of Columbine
and other heavily publicized school shootings obviously haunts school officials
everywhere. But zero tolerance long predates that massacre. The Education Department
reported that in the 1996-97 school year--two years before Columbine--94% of
schools nationwide already had zero-tolerance policies for firearms.
<p> The reactions we've seen lately--reminiscent of the Secret Service investigating
every wisecrack or offhand remark about assassinating the president--are vastly
disproportionate to the actual risk. The Secret Service has reason to be hypervigilant.
Of the 42 men who have served as president, four were assassinated and another
six survived at least one assassination attempt. If you're president, then,
the odds of your being an assassination target are 23.8%, or nearly one in four.
The likelihood of being killed in school is more like one in two million, or
0.00005%.
<p> The Associated Press reported yesterday that the Columbine Review Commission,
set up by Gov. Bill Owens in the wake of the 1999 massacre, is recommending
that every Colorado high school set up a team to evaluate verbal and written
threats. Perhaps these teams will approach the task with sensitivity and common
sense. But if the stories we've seen from around the country are any indication,
America's schoolchildren have more to fear from mass hysteria in the name of
zero tolerance than from any lack of vigilance on the part of school officials.
<p><i>Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com.</i>
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<strong>May 18, 2001</strong><br /><em>7:36am EDT</em></font></i></td>
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