Zero Tolerance

Why do schools overreact to firearms -- even to the point of 30-day suspensions for a piece of paper folded to vaugely resemble a firearm?  It's not because they are trying to keep the kids safe; the administrators know damn well that a folded paper "gun" is harmless.  And it's not a misguided attempt to keep themselves from being sued by following a strict, no-discretion zero-tolerance policy -- that excuse got old a long time ago. 

Instead, I'm convinced it's really part of their efforts to "educate" the children they are "in charge" of.  They wield strict punishments in futile attempts to prevent even the thought of a firearm entering the pretty empty heads of their students, because if they can do that successfully for 18 years, the vast majority of those students will never break their conditioning as adults.

Four months after junior Neil Cronin and three classmates were led out of Duxbury High in handcuffs after a world languages teacher reported that the students smelled like marijuana, the 17-year-old is back in school. But the case, along with those of at least nine students in the past year to face serious disciplinary action related to charges of substance abuse, has set off fierce debate in the town over the district's zero-tolerance policy.

The 17-year-old sportsman ? ready to take on the school system in court over its rejection of a photo for the yearbook in which his broken-open shotgun rests on his shoulder ? said he does not belong to a single club.

In past years, he said, assistant principals and teachers confiscated his gun magazines during his lunch periods.

Recently, Londonderry school officials nixed the avid sports shooter?s submitted senior yearbook picture, in which a smiling Douglass has a Ruger Red Label shotgun slung over his shoulder.

Elefante agreed with Juster?s assessment, also labeling the photo ?inappropriate.? He cited the district?s no-tolerance policy on violence, drugs and alcohol.

It sounds like this is a long-running conflict that has finally reached the point of a lawsuit. Good luck, kid. Give 'em hell.

A Londonderry High School senior may wind up suing the district after the administration denied his request to use a picture with a trapshooting gun on his shoulder as his yearbook photo, said Penny Dean, the student?s Concord-based lawyer.

The general perception of Republicans is that they protect the 2nd Amendment and attack the 1st. The general perception of Democrats is that they attack the 2nd and protect the 1st. The only problem is, that's not always true. Democrats support free speech only for people who agree with them.

I know this is dreaming, and I know that government school administrators are going to be spending quite a lot of time during the summer conjuring up new ways to tax and spend, but is there any chance at all that some of them could give some thought to fixing this idiotic ?zero-tolerance? thing they?re all so proud of?

Unfortunately, no. Zero tolerance was invented as nothing more than a means to shield administrators from parental lawsuits. The beaurocrats are doing what they do best: covering their own ass. Don't look for the demise of zero tolerance until its proponents are sued for practicing it -- repeatedly and with large judgements against them.

Apparantly the right to wear a T-shirt with the NRA logo on it while in school is still protected.

Meanwhile, police state policies roam unchecked in Tempe, Arizona. As reported in the Scottsdale Tribune on May 13, 2003, authorities at Connolly Middle School suspended a 12- year-old girl for a month (reduced later to 12 days), for bringing a small pocketknife to a teacher 30 minutes after she discovered the little tool in her backpack.

Virtually every student who has ever attended school has heard the phrase, "No talking in class." Now, an elementary school in southern Oregon has taken that proscription a step further, by banning all conversation between boys and girls.

Parents are laughing at the intolerance of the zero tolerance rules that have been instituted in so many public schools. Laughing, that is, unless it is their own sons who are victimized by policies that seem to lack common sense. It's a serious matter when a good child is expelled from school, suspended or sent to a detention facility to take classes with real delinquents. Here are some recent examples of how the zero tolerance hatchet is wielded in public schools.

School officials suspended two Oak Mountain Middle School students for one day for having toy guns on a school bus. A bus driver called the Shelby County Sheriff's Department when she saw the two boys on the bus ahead of her with what she thought was a real gun. School officials say the toy guns were taken to school as part of a literature project on "Treasure Island."

Dumbarton Middle School in Rodgers Forge has suspended indefinitely a sixth-grade pupil who brought a toy gun to school and told classmates it was real, school officials said yesterday. Assistant Principal Michael Etzel said he removed the boy from his first-period class on Tuesday, after a classmate reported the remarks. "At no time was there a threat to any kids in the school," Etzel said yesterday.

If there was no threat, why was he suspended?

The mother of a Midway High School student, who was suspended from the school for bringing an inoperative gun in his car for a class assignment, said the Zero Tolerance Policy should not have applied to her son. Florence Spurgeon said her son, 17-year-old senior Joseph Metzger, was suspended for the rest of the school year. The student brought an old gun that was used as a prop for the filming of a class project based on the Shakespeare play ýMacbeth,ý she said. The gun was discovered last Tuesday and the suspension followed the same day.

A first-grader became the latest kid suspended from school for having a nonweapon "weapon" (a plastic school cafeteria knife), but his parents threatened criminal charges against the school (for arming 6-year-olds with weapons) if the suspension stood.

Declan's PoliTech brings us the tale of 13 high school students facing felony charges for "tampering" with laptop computers issued by their school district.  The students determined the administrative password for the computer systems and removed filtering software that tried to block access to music downloads and "inappropriate images" (eg, pornography).

Now, anyone with any sense knows that a teenager is going to be pushing every limit they can manage with reasonable safety -- and sometimes even those that aren't safe at all.  If you're going to hand out laptops to your students for personal use, then by all the gods, they are going to try to break your stupid censorship limitations!

Charging them with a felony for doing so is obscene.

Computer security laws are still insane.  So are school administrators.