SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS SHOULD TAKE 'CHILL PILL'

THE CASE of third-grader Ryan Wright, suspended from O'Rourke Elementary
School for taking a vitamin pill during the school day, is another example
of the idiocy of so-called "zero tolerance" policies and their kin.

O'Rourke's principal, Karen Mohr, can say she is merely following explicit
school system policy. Indeed, the policy says that the minimum penalty for
bringing vitamins to school is a five-day suspension.

But the school system's code also may be read to allow discretion based on
the "age and maturity" of the student. Somehow, the system's top
administrators should do a better job of stressing to principals that the
"age and maturity" clause allows enough room for common sense.

Otherwise, the code effectively imposes a senseless bureacratic rigidity
instead. That's what is meant by "zero tolerance" -- an intolerance for
banned substances that is so strong that it strictly mandates extreme
penalties for any breach of the rules, no matter how unintentional or harmless.

As with all zero tolerance policies, the case of Ryan Wright is an example
of good intentions gone haywire. Everybody can agree on the necessity of
keeping illegal narcotics out of schools, and on the importance of also
monitoring the use of legitimately prescribed medications to ensure they
aren't abused.

But it's asinine to suspend a third-grader for five days for, at his
mother's direction, taking a harmless vitamin capsule -- even if he did
call it "an energy pill." Obviously, the Wright family broke the rules.
Just as obviously, young Ryan and his mother -- a registered nurse -- had
no nefarious intentions.

This case is reminiscent of a slew of other examples from across the
country, and from here in southern Alabama, in which school administrators
imposed wildly harsh penalties for minor offenses. Every few months, it
seems, a student somewhere is over-penalized for "transgressions" such as
eating lemon drops, sharing a lemon-scented towelette, or unknowingly
possessing warm beer or bread knives (left there unintentionally by other
family members) in the back of pickup trucks parked on campus.

In some cases, children have been punished for pointing fingers as if they
were guns during playground games of cops-n-robbers.

The reason for rules against such things as vitamin pills is that there
sometimes is no easy way for school officials to know whether the child is
consuming something harmless or something dangerous. It makes sense, then,
for a school disciplinary code to allow the option for severe punishment in
order to make students and parents take the prohibition seriously.

But a wise code will nevertheless allow some leeway for common sense. For a
first-time offense that proves to be harmless (a vitamin pill rather than
medication, for instance, or fingers instead of guns), the code should
allow for a stern warning, a meeting with the parents, a probation of some
sort, or some other intermediate penalty before the harsher punishment
kicks in for a second offense.

Otherwise, in the name of enforcing discipline, the schools instead
encourage a disrespect for an authority that can prove itself so inane and
overreactive.

If school authorities can't see the problems with their own inflexible
rules, and refuse to apply those rules more sensibly, they betray judgment
far worse than that shown by Ryan Wright's parents.