ZERO TOLERANCE IS DOING KIDS MORE HARM THAN GOOD

COULD WE begin this millennium with a policy that offers kids something
more than "zero tolerance"?

Zero tolerance began as a popular promise of punishment for any student who
brought the streets into the schools. There would no leniency for violence,
drugs, weapons. One strike and you're out.

Gradually, the name became all too accurate. Zero tolerance for misbehavior
evolved into zero tolerance for kids themselves. We've developed an
attitude. We're in a time of a general crackdown - a tough love without the
love. Zero is now a symbol of bankruptcy.

In Maryland, we just learned again that the much touted boot camps for
young offenders easily turn into abuse camps. The idea that you can
straighten kids out by beating them up has been continually discredited
without being abandoned.

Next week, we'll hear again about two Virginia fifth-graders who allegedly
put soap in their teacher's water. The pair weren't given detention, mind
you, they were charged with a felony. One plea-bargained this "crime" into
a misdemeanor.

The other comes up for a hearing Monday.

We'll also hear from the 18-year-old Floridian who threatened a Columbine
High sophomore over the Internet. On January 11, Michael Campbell will be
in a Colorado court. A month after his father's death from cancer, the
student sent an AOL message saying he was going to "finish what begun" at
Columbine. Now he faces five years in prison.

On the same day, in Illinois, a court will rule on whether six Decatur
students, originally expelled for two years after a stadium brawl, were
denied a fair hearing. Jesse Jackson contends that this "zero tolerance" is
applied with lopsided mathematics to minorities.

These are not just random anecdotes; they're dots that connect into a
trend. As the stories pile along, says Jim McComb, an opponent of boot
camps and director of the Maryland juvenile justice Coalition, "You've got
to scratch your head and say, 'What's going on here?' "

Now, we are lowering the age at which children can be tried as adults and
throwing away the key. Marcia Lowry, a children's rights lawyer, puts it
this way: I am seeing a lot of willingness to give up on kids at an early
stage."

I'm not suggesting that troubled teenagers are misunderstood angels nor am
I dismissing the genuine fear that has spread out from the school
shootings. Having ignored a trail of clues left by two suicidal murderers,
it's no wonder that nervous Colorado officials take one online threat as if
it were the real thing.

Jesse Jackson, for that matter, may not have picked the right boys or the
right incident to make his point. But he is right in zeroing in on intolerance.

Whether we're talking about kids who were arrested for putting soap in a
teacher's drink, or a girl who died in a boot camp to which she was
sentenced for shoplifting, or a teenager kicked out of school because he
took a troubled friend's knife away and put it in his locker, we aren't
paying attention to the individual stories of individual kids.

We're punishing them.

The two most searing stories of the past holiday season? One was about the
small Memphis boy who went home from school every night to an apartment
where his mother's body lay rotting. The boy was so isolated, so afraid
he'd end up in foster care that he told no one of her death.

In a second and similar story, a 7-year old Massachusetts girl who told a
teacher that her mother had died, was reportedly scolded, "You shouldn't
say things like that." So the girl spent that night alone with the corpse.

The uneasy truth is that children are often tragically disconnected. The
schools don't really know their lives; the communities are clueless.

Paying real attention to the younger generation is labor-intensive. It
consists of connections and discipline, expectation and second chances. But
in raising kids, as a parent or a country, zero tolerance adds up to
absolutely nothing.