COMMON SENSE SHOULD RULE AT SCHOOL

I HAVE written this column before. Each time, I figure this has got to be
the last one and I'll never have to make these points again. Each time, I'm
wrong.

So here we go again. Let me lay the situation out for you.

There's this kid, a 13-year-old middle-schooler named Benjamin Ratner. One
day a girl passes him a note confiding that she has brought a knife to
school and might use it to kill herself. Benjamin talks her into giving him
the knife, which is hidden inside a notebook. Without opening the notebook,
Benjamin puts it in his locker, intending to give it to his mother so that
she can speak to the mother of the troubled girl.

Two of the girl's friends tell you about this. What do you do?

(A) Give Benjamin a medal.

(B) Praise Benjamin for his actions, but reprimand him for not immediately
turning the knife over to an administrator.

(C) Suspend Benjamin for four months.

If you said A or B, well . . . you have no future as a middle school
administrator. Because the correct answer is C, according to officials at
Blue Ridge Middle School in Purcellville, Va., where this is playing out.
The suspension took effect in October and was just upheld -- unanimously --
by a school board disciplinary panel. Benjamin doesn't go back to class
until January.

Principal Joe Mauck is the man who recommended suspension. He wants you to
know that he personally made sure every student at his school knew the
weapons policy before this ever happened. Besides, he says, Benjamin's
punishment could have been worse. He could have been expelled.

Thank heaven for small favors, I suppose.

As I said, I've written this column before. Wrote it when Benjamin's part
was played by a first-grader in North Carolina who got suspended for sexual
harassment after kissing a little girl on the cheek. Wrote it when Benjamin
was a 13-year-old honor student in Ohio who got in hot water for violating
the school's drug policy by bringing Midol to class.

Each time I write it, I find myself asking the same question: Have we lost
our minds? Have we become so cowed by rules that there's no longer room for
simple common sense?

I phrased the question a tad more diplomatically when I called Benjamin's
principal. I asked what he'd have done if there had been no school weapons
policy and he'd been left to act on his instincts. Mauck dodged the
question.

``Times have changed from 20 years ago when I started,'' he said, noting
that schools are more violent places now than they were. ``I don't think you
can even answer that question.''

Sure you can. Because, while a series of high-profile school shootings has
fed the impression that young people are increasingly violent, the fact is
the rate of violent crime among juveniles is lower than it's been since
1987. The Justice Policy Institute reports that a student is likelier to be
struck by lightning than shot to death at school.

This is not to minimize what has recently happened in Littleton, West
Paducah, Pearl and other places. It is only to offer perspective. Our
schools are not more dangerous than they ever were. We are just more
panicked.

And in our panic, we have substituted inflexible rules for the discernment
of women and men. The ability to intuit, to infer, to make distinctions, to
draw conclusions, to JUDGE . . . this is something we no longer value, it
seems.

Instead, we demand a uniformity of response in our public officials such
that, if A happens, then B must in all cases follow. Even if B is absolutely
the wrong thing. Even if B is a stupid overreaction. Even then. Zero
tolerance and all that.

There's nothing wrong with a policy that punishes kids for bringing weapons
to school. But there is something wrong, dangerous, ominous and even a
little creepy about a policy that treats a child who was trying to save a
life the same as it would a child who was planning to paint the halls with
blood.

Zero tolerance for violence? From where I sit, it looks more like zero
tolerance for common sense.

Leonard Pitts Jr. writes for the Miami Herald. Contact him at elpjay@aol.com
or (800) 457-3881.