ZERO-TOLERANCE RULES ARE SIMPLY TOO RIGID

Schools are on the wrong track with inflexible rules of conduct.

What does the strange case of Mrs. Tina Schafnitz, age 37, have to do with
zero tolerance in our schools?

If you live in Newport Beach or adjacent communities the chances are fair
that you have read Mrs. Schafnitz's name in the paper or seen her picture
in the society pages.

Mrs. Schafnitz is very active in several high-profile charities and has
devoted much time and a lot of money to several worthy causes. Mrs.
Schafnitz no longer goes to public school, but if she did, she would now be
the equivalent of a good student with 20 hours per week of community
service. She'd be the homecoming queen and, perhaps, the student body
president. Mrs. Schafnitz would be the kid who tutors your daughter in math
while organizing a beach trip for the kids on Minnie Street in Santa Ana.
If you need a poster person for giving something back to the community,
she's your candidate.

Mrs. Schafnitz is a wife and the mother of a boy with a rare condition
which has limited his growth. That, naturally, caused her to dive head
first into involvement with the Short Stature Foundation, a group which
supports folks with conditions such as her son's.

On March 16, Tustin police arrested Mrs. Schafnitz. The cops allege that
she sold 16 grams of cocaine to an undercover officer for $1,120. Adding to
her woes was the discovery of an unloaded gun in the trunk of her car. At
her arraignment last week, she pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Orange County's top drug prosecutor says that Mrs. Schafnitz faces a
maximum of nine years in jail. If you're a zero-tolerace fan, this is your
chance to level the playing field and make an example of someone.

If you insist on teaching kids that mitigating circumstances don't apply to
them because of zero0tolerance rules, you can now, with a clear conscience,
throw the book at a valuable member of our society.

The question for all you zero-tolerance diehards is: If she is found guilty
of these crimes, and assuming that this is her first offense, what should
be her punishment?

The dilemma is that the zero-tolerance rules in our schools leave us no
alternative but to apply the same rules to adults. Zero tolerance punishes
the good student who brings her regular prescription medicine to school
without the prescription-labeled bottle with the same penalty as the
student who purposely loads a beer in her backpack.

To be consistent in the adult world, we must uniformly punish all adults
who sell cocaine, without any regard whatsoever to their criminal history,
obligations or contributions to society. The punishment for the
child-neglecting crack addict on welfare who gets busted for dealing must
be the same as the woman who has helped thousands of abused and neglected
kids find hope in their lives.

Kids see through the adult hypocrisy of zero tolerance. In the adult world,
we have grades of every type of crime and the corresponding punishment. For
example, all moving traffic violations are not equally penalized. The
failure to signal for a right turn is not fined the same as running a red
light. In the adult world of zero tolerance, however, a traffic infraction
is a traffic infraction and all should receive the same penalty.

Moving up the crime scale, we have murder. There are many who believe that
anyone found guilty of murder should be executed; yet, in the United
States, convicted murderers get out of prison in a average of 12 years.
Why? Among the reasons are that our system has determined, right or wrong,
that not all murders are the same. We have manslaughter, third-degree,
second degree, etc. We have murder with special circumstances. Once in
prison, we have the ever-popular "time off for good behavior." In the
zero-tolerance mind, however, there is no wiggle room.

Kids see this and wonder why adults don't play by the same rules for their
more serious crimes. The discrepancy between adult and child zero tolerance
becomes another case of "Do as I say, not as I do." And, please, don't
think for a moment that I equate what Mrs. Schafnitz is alleged to have
done with any of these examples.

Mrs. Schafnitz doesn't get a pass on her alleged crimes. What she is said
to have done is extremely serious. But the price she pays can be different
than another's without compromising our legacy of appropriately punishing
the guilty.

Perhaps you now understand the corner that school boards paint themselves
into each time they adopt constricting zero-tolerance policies. This is not
an essay about Tina Schafnitz but of exposing the land mines of
zero-tolerance policies. Still, I'll offer that if she is guilty, justice
will not be served by sending her to prison.

I recently saw the movie "Ulee's Gold." There's a line spoken by Peter
Fonda that zero-tolerance proponents should ponder: "I know that there are
all kinds of weaknesses in the world and not all of them are evil."