SCHOOLS' ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICIES 100% RIDICULOUS

As always, there is good news and bad news on the zero-tolerance
front.

First, the good news. Back in the late 1980s, when public hysteria
about day-care abuse and satanic cults was beginning to subside, its
successor doctrine captured the imagination of school administrators.
This was the notion that a "drug-free school zone" did not just mean
the absence of marijuana and heroin, but any pharmaceutical product
whatsoever.

Since analgesics for headaches and menstrual cramps may be regarded as
drugs, school principals swung quickly into action. Students were
forbidden either to possess or ingest such dangerous opiates as
Tylenol, and students with particular medical problems were required
to store their pills and elixirs under lock and key in clinics.

This had the salutary effect of preventing scholar-athletes in pain
from seeking relief, and putting girls trading Motrin on the school
bus under suspension - if not expulsion. It also meant that students
with asthma, which affects millions of children and is the leading
cause of school absence in America, had to store their life-saving
medication and inhalers, locked and inaccessible, in school clinics.
As anyone with any experience of asthma is aware, time is of the
essence when breathing is impossible. But zero tolerance leaves no
wiggle room for rationality: gasping students in need of their
inhalers are regarded in the same light as junkies in search of a fix.
The result was inevitable. In California, an 11-year-old boy named
Philip Gonzalez was excused to go to the bathroom, and shortly
appeared in the office exhibiting signs of a severe asthma attack.
Because the administration required that medication be stored in one
specific place in school - in contravention, incidentally, of
California education guidelines - he was unable to gain access to
relief in time, suffocated, and died.

Unfortunately, zero-tolerance policies are equally applied to another
source of public anxiety: guns. School administrators seem incapable
of distinguishing between an M-16 and a water pistol, and the same
instinct that confiscates your grandmother's nail clipper at the
airport now treats members of rifle teams and skeet-shooting clubs as
incipient felons.

Case in point: Seventeen-year-old Joshua Phelps, a high school student
and civil war re-enactor in Pine Bush, N.Y., north of New York City,
who made the mistake of driving to school one Monday morning after
participating in a weekend Union Army re-enactment. A member of the
Pine Bush High School's Civil War Club, and budding history buff,
young Phelps left his replica musket (which fires blanks only),
uniform, bayonet and rolled cartridge on his car seat, where a
security guard spotted the evidence of interest in Ulysses S. Grant.

Phelps was called from class to the principal's office, and the police
were summoned. The cops confiscated the replica musket, placed Phelps
under arrest, bound him in handcuffs, and have charged him with
misdemeanor criminal possession of a weapon. He not only faces up to a
year in jail, but is likely to be expelled from Pine Bush High School.

"I know this might appear to be a minor thing, but it's not," says
the local police chief, Daniel McCann. "The musket was found in his
car on the high school grounds and could have been used."

McCann is certainly correct to say that "this might appear to be a
minor thing, but it's not." That's right, chief; it's a major
outrage. The fake musket might have been used on the school grounds,
but it was not - and a quick, sober review of the facts, and Joshua
Phelps, would have explained the circumstances, and prevented a
needless abuse of police power.

But that would have required invoking common sense, and defying the
cardinal spirit of zero tolerance.

* Philip Terzian writes for Rhode Island's Providence Journal.