BLACK TEENS SHOWN DOOR AS US SCHOOLS APPLY ZERO TOLERANCE

Black students in American schools are being expelled and suspended far
more than whites, despite the fact that white teenagers are responsible for
the majority of classroom shootings, a detailed report showed yesterday.

A spate of student shootings spurred education administrators across the
United States to impose "zero tolerance" discipline systems in most school
districts.

But a nationwide study of the systems shows that in the two years since
zero tolerance began, black students at the schools surveyed have been
expelled or suspended from school three to five times more frequently than
their white counterparts.

The survey raises fresh questions about the workings of a policy that
spread rapidly in the aftermath of incidents such as the Columbine high
school massacre in Colorado, and which has been widely supported by
politicians in the US, as well as by members of the Labour government in
Britain.

In San Francisco, blacks accounted for 52% of suspensions and expulsions,
despite the fact that they made up only 16% of the state school enrolment.

In Phoenix, where 4% of students are black, blacks make up 21% of those
suspended or expelled. And in Denver, where the Columbine shootings took
place this year in a largely white suburb, blacks account for 42% of
suspensions and expulsions but only 21% of student numbers.

The findings back a campaign over a zero tolerance school discipline case
in Decatur, Illinois, led by the Rev Jesse Jackson, the civil rights
leader. "The figures are astounding," Mr Jackson said yesterday, after he
appeared in court on Thursday in Decatur on trespass and delinquency
charges arising from his protest campaign.

"Increasingly, school districts are choosing penal remedies over
educational remedies when it comes to disciplining students. The reasons
for these glaring disparities must also be explored."

Mr Jackson's campaign focuses on seven black male students at a local high
school who were expelled for two years fighting at a school football game.
Since the students were in their final year and no other schools in the
district were prepared to take them, the expulsions in effect put an end to
their education.

Mr Jackson mounted a series of demonstrations on behalf of six of the
students who challenged the ruling, which led to the expulsions being
reduced to one year and allowed the students to attend a special school for
troubled teenagers.

Still dissatisfied at the outcome, Mr Jackson mounted another protest in
November at which he was arrested. The civil rights leader has been widely
accused in the media of personal publicity seeking.

Yesterday, Mr Jackson said that the new study vindicated his position that
zero tolerance policies were "arbitrary and capricious" and that they had
resulted in wide racial disparities in the disciplining of white and black
students.

"Our youth are being driven from the educational process and into the
streets," Mr Jackson said. The new survey, published by the Applied
Research Centre (Arc) in Oakland, California, showed that blacks were
expelled and suspended disproportionately in 10 of the largest US school
districts in which racial data on school discipline is recorded.

The figures come amid widespread anecdotal evidence that blacks and whites
are treated differently for similar incidents in US schools.

Arc project director Terry Keleher yesterday cited a case in which a black
student in Rhode Island was expelled after he had been asked by a teacher
to help unjam a computer disk and had pulled out a small folding pocket
knife to assist him.

By contrast, Mr Keleher said, a white student in Vermont who was found with
a rifle in school was not expelled or suspended after he explained that it
was the hunting season.

Although the case in Decatur involves black students, Mr Jackson's campaign
has in fact tried to play down the race aspect, highlighting the social
injustice that he believes zero tolerance inflicts on working-class
students of all races.

With 80% of US schools now embracing zero tolerance regimes, stories of
inflexible overreaction to policies outlawing guns, weapons, drugs and
fighting are rapidly increasing.

In one case in Colorado, a 17-year-old white girl was suspended after
mentioning that she had a pocket knife in the first-aid kit of her car,
parked in the school car park.

Columbine high school, where two pupils killed 13 people, remained closed
for a second day yesterday after a teenage pupil received an email
threatening "to finish what begun[sic]". Police later tracked down the
sender.