In Our View

SEATTLE SCHOOL LEARNS LIFE ISN'T AN ABSOLUTE

A "zero tolerance" policy makes zero sense in the real world. It sounds
good when politicians and school officials tout it during election time.
The casualty, though, is common sense.

A zero tolerance policy regarding threats of violence led to the emergency
expulsion of a Battle Ground High School student last May for allegedly
writing a fictional essay about a student who strangled his teacher.
Similar outrageousness has occurred in schools across the nation. A
6-year-old Colorado Springs boy was suspended for half a day for violating
his school's zero tolerance policy on drugs and drug look-alikes when he
brought lemon drops to school. Officials declared a 12-year-old Maryland
girl a "drug trafficker" after she shared her inhaler with a classmate
suffering a severe asthma attack.

And it was a zero tolerance policy regarding weapons -- even toy weapons --
that led to the expulsion of a Seattle sixth-grader whose squirt gun fell
out of his backpack in the cafeteria.

Common sense may yet prevail. Seattle school officials this week reduced
the student's punishment to a temporary suspension. By extending the
automatic expulsion penalty from real weapons to fake ones last year, "I
think we overreached a little," the school's attorney admitted to the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A little? Imposing such laughable, one-size-clobbers-all rules damages
school officials' credibility with parents, students and taxpayers.
Students should be taught reasoning skills by example, and harsh
punishments should be saved for hard cases.

It's not being soft on drugs to allow one teen-age girl to give her friend
a Midol. It's not an invitation to a massacre to confiscate a squirt gun
without treating its owner as a convicted felon. And rather than expelling
an essayist, schools ought to be encouraging his talents in positive
directions. That's what schools are for.

Checked-by: Richard Lake