SCHOOL SAFETY:

ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICIES REACH RIDICULOUS HEIGHTS

The children of Acquinton Elementary School in King William are safe now
that Nicholas Heath has paid his debt to society. Then again, they were
safe before he had paid his debt to society, too.

Heath is an Acquinton third-grader who received a seven-day suspension
after his mother packed a butter knife in his lunch so he could spread his
peanut butter and jelly. The boy was not threatening anyone, but he was
suspended anyway - and threatened with a year in disciplinary class -
because Acquinton subscribes to the idiotic policy of zero tolerance.

Zero tolerance is a swell concept, sort of like perpetual-motion machines.
But problems inevitably arise in its application. School administrators
across the country seem incapable of exercising the least degree of
thought, or of seeing a difference between, say, an aspirin and a vial of
crack cocaine - or a butter knife and a switchblade. Some of the cases on
record would have Franz Kafka shaking his head in disbelief.

ABOUT THIS time last year, for instance, a student at a Hampton, Virginia,
elementary school was suspended for biting a classmate twice in two days.
That would seem a reasonable response - "Suspensions are appropriate with
kids [who] understand they're being punished," said a UVa education expert
at the time. Only problem was, the suspended child was 2. He was attending
a special speech-therapy class at Tucker-Capps Elementary School. As the
UVa expert said, "Suspending a 2-year-old for something he won't remember,
that's absurd."

But absurd is the order of the day across the nation - from Escambia,
Florida, where Tawana Dawson was suspended for having nail clippers, to
Sayreville, New Jersey, where four kindergartners were suspended for
playing cops-and-robbers (violent and threatening, according to the school
district) to Silver Valley, California (cops-and-robbers again) to
Muskogee, Oklahoma (copsand-robbers yet again) to Ouachita Parish,
Louisiana, where an 8-year-old was suspended for drawing a picture of an
Army man; a teacher found the drawing threatening.

More than anecdotal evidence suggests schools are going off the deep end.
The American Educational Research Foundation concluded, in a 2000 report,
that while zero-tolerance policies take it as understood that discipline is
a "rational act that follows disruptive student behavior in a logical
sequence," such is rarely the case. Last week John Whitehead, of the
Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute, which litigates such cases,
said he sees no abatement of the problem.

Zero-tolerance policies make life easy for school officials because they
limit the need for judgment and independent thought, reduce discrepancies
in discipline, and - in theory - lower the likelihood of being sued. They
also involve a wide margin of safety; many school districts rushed to adopt
such policies after the horrific mass murder by Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold at Columbine High School in Colorado.

BUT THE PASSAGE of time shows how an understandable desire to protect
students and staff has reached ridiculous heights. Zero tolerance makes
sense for actual threats - guns, combat knives, illegal narcotics.
Unfortunately, school systems seem willfully blind to concepts and
categories. A pupil who points a finger at a playmate and says "pow" during
a game of cops-and-robbers is not pointing a loaded gun at someone. The
9-year-old in Manassas who was suspended for offering a classmate a candy
breath mint was not dealing hard drugs.

Some public officials think it's time to restore a measure of common sense.
Delegate Brad Marrs repeatedly has introduced legislation in the General
Assembly specifying that students should not be punished for defending
themselves when physically assaulted, or for having in their possession
personal grooming items, eating utensils, or non-prescription medications
with their parents' approval. The measures went nowhere.

Parents of children caught up in draconian discipline policies have good
reason to be outraged. All parents have good reason to wonder how well
their children are being taught when school personnel seem incapable of
drawing the most rudimentary distinctions. So does the general public, as
well as one little King William boy - who wanted only peanut butter and
jelly, and found himself in a jam.