KEEPING TABS ON VIOLENCE

During an era when school shootings have become frighteningly common,
parents in St. Bernard Parish are asking school officials there to answer
an important question: How badly must a student misbehave before law
enforcement authorities get a call?

Some of those parents believe that school officials haven't treated certain
incidents seriously enough. They say that by not referring those cases to
the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office, school officials are acting with
too much leniency.

School officials counter that they need the discretion to deal with
disciplinary problems as they see fit, handling most of them in-house and
calling the police only when it's necessary.

That's as it should be. Too many school districts across the country have
worked so hard to prevent a Columbine-type tragedy from happening in their
jurisdiction that they have abandoned their commonsense policies and
replaced them with zero-tolerance ones. Under those policies, the child who
brings a nail file to school is treated the same as the child who brings a
meat cleaver.

That's not to criticize parents who want the assurance that their children
will be safe in school, nor is it to agree unconditionally with the way St.
Bernard officials have handled their disciplinary problems. It's clear that
school officials need to have a dialogue with parents to explain their
policies and listen to parents' concerns. The officials should have
discretion, but that doesn't mean that parents and law enforcement
officials should be left in the dark.

Two recent incidents have upset some parents in St. Bernard Parish. One
involved a fifth-grader bringing a Daisy pellet gun to school. In another
incident, a middle school student allegedly gave another student half a
pill of Ritalin, a stimulant used to treat hyperactivity.

Neither incident was reported to law enforcement authorities. School
officials say they couldn't independently verify the allegation that one
student gave another a prescription drug. They did, however, know about the
child who brought the pellet gun to campus. While maybe they shouldn't be
criticized for not reporting the Ritalin incident to police, it does seem
bizarre that they chose not to report the incident involving the gun.

Bev Lawrason, a spokeswoman for the school system, called the pellet gun "a
child's toy," and said, for that reason, the police were not called.

Calling a pellet gun "a toy" is a stretch. In fact, Ms. Lawrason's
description contradicts the warning issued by the Daisy Manufacturing Co.
The manufacturer says on its Web site, "Airguns are real guns, not toys.
You or others can be killed or seriously injured if these rules are not
followed."

School officials should not have downplayed the seriousness of that
student's offense. The police should have been notified.

Sheriff Jack Stephens says school officials are in the best position to
know when his department should be contacted. Once that happens, his
officers have little latitude and may have to book the student with a crime.

No principal who cares deeply about students wants to see any of them
charged with a felony, so the school administrator's reluctance to involve
law enforcement is understandable.

Turning a student over to the police may never be an easy decision for a
principal to make, but sometimes the situation will demand it. St. Bernard
school officials need to do more to assure parents that while they won't
call the police for every schoolyard scrap, they know how to recognize a
truly serious violation and will call in the police to handle it.