PLACES OF LEARNING

Assault Isn't An Administrative Matter

The title of a bill signed into law two years ago was "Lose Control, Lose
Your License." Proponents called it "a tremendous carrot and stick" and "a
powerful tool." The benefits would far outweigh any problems.

The response here was an editorial titled, "Good Idea, Bad Vehicle," which
argued that (A) serious crimes, on campus as anywhere else, should be met
with sterner measures than the loss of a diver's license and (B) educators
shouldn't be turned into clerk/informants for the N.C. Division of Motor
Vehicles.

We win -- drat it.

There is evidence that, had the General Assembly stuck to promoting
something more directly related to education, such as staying in school, it
would have something to brag about. But its insistence on passing a law
aimed at specific, serious offenses -- possession or sale of alcohol or a
controlled substance, possession of or use of a weapon on school property,
assault on a teacher -- was a mistake.

In the last school year, 103 Cumberland County students lost their
licenses. But that was for dropping out of school, which is covered by
another law. Only 130 students, statewide, lost their licenses under the
"Lose Control" law.

Was that because some students were deterred from losing control and
therefore retained their licenses? Perhaps. The statistics are murky and
mildly quirky, so it's impossible to prove or disprove anything to a
scientific certainty (another oversight by the law's authors). But how
likely is it that aggressive students were more successful at retaining
control than their schoolmates were at resisting the temptation to drop out
- -- a non-crime?

Of 403 Cumberland County students suspended last year, most were suspended
for offenses that fell into the general categories targeted by the act:
drugs, weapons, violence. Only 87 were suspended for unspecified "other
incidents."

That is not a success story. It is, however, a story that was repeated in
other school systems in this area although, in the absence of reliable
data, we won't call it a trend.

Let's get back to basics, plus one.

A student who slugs a teacher is not a "discipline problem." Slugging a
teacher is a crime, and an assault on the educational system itself, and
one who does it belongs in handcuffs -- not on a report dutifully filed
with the DMV.

Teachers are neither investigators nor police officers, and they have
plenty to occupy their time.

The plus-one, not mentioned in 1999: What we are talking about here could
be called "prohibited crimes," a redundancy that implies that some criminal
acts will go unpunished if committed on a school campus. The possibility
that this is an actual inducement to commit such crimes on campus gathers
force from the lack of severity of the punishment awaiting the offender:
license suspension is for up to one year. That compares quite favorably
with the penalty for doing the same thing on a city street.

Dropout penalties, rewards for academic excellence -- all of those deserve
further study, assuming the data-collection can be improved.

But it's time to get the "Lose Control" law off the books and leave this
part of the violent offender's education to the criminal justice system.