ZERO TOLERANCE, PRETTY MUCH

"Zero tolerance" simply will not be permitted. At least that's the message
of some recent court decisions that deal with "zero tolerance" laws with
respect to weapons and drugs in public schools.

It all started in Tennessee with the General Assembly's decision that
students who bring weapons or drugs to school would face mandatory expulsion
or referral to juvenile or criminal court. Everyone thought that was a good
idea until students started to face mandatory punishment for bringing
prescription drugs or kitchen utensils to school.

A federal court decision about a year ago involving Dustin Seal, a Knoxville
student who had driven a car to a football game with a hunting knife in the
glove compartment, came to the right result. The Sixth Circuit Court of
Appeals said that expelling Dustin for a year just for having a knife in his
car was unreasonable and unconstitutional.

That decision prodded Tennessee lawmakers to modify the zero tolerance law.
Currently, amended law still lists behaviors that simply will not be
tolerated (such things as bringing prescription drugs and weapons to school
apparently fall into this category), but now specifies that the punishment
won't necessarily be a one-year suspension. The original law said that the
punishment must be "swift, certain, and severe." The post-verdict law
clarifies matters somewhat: Such behavior as bringing prescribed allergy
medication to school still "will not be tolerated," but punishment must be
"reasonable" and "may include a spectrum of disciplinary measures."

So what we have now is -- well, the kindest thing we could call it is
discretionary zero tolerance. (Or perhaps, with a nod to last year's
presidential elections, compassionate zero tolerance.)

What's really going on is that local school boards are quietly making
inroads into zero tolerance. For instance, Hamilton County schools will make
an exception for someone who's been prescribed drugs so long as school
procedure is followed. This makes sense: Nobody wants to expel a student for
bringing allergy medication to school.

But a badly crafted, overbroad law that requires individual school districts
to come up with special procedures to modify it is vastly inferior to a
well-written law that works as it was meant to. Maybe the solution is just
to get the law right in the first place. And as satisfying and dramatic as
the notion of zero tolerance is, maybe a one-size-fits-all law that attempts
to cover every school district in Tennessee isn't the right approach.

Maybe a better idea is to let the people who run different school districts
come up with their own disciplinary rules. They're capable of making
intelligent distinctions, and it's not clear that the Tennessee Legislature
has demonstrated any special expertise in this area.