Zero-Tolerance In Schools...goes waaaaay overboard

[Revan]

So I'm a member of Salon (the lovely site where Julie Powell (if you don't know her then watch Julie & Julia or read the book of the same name) wrote her blog that made her famous) and I found a blog posting that has shown me that in the States, zero tolerance in schools has gone over the top for real now. Here's the post:

Earlier this month, twelve year old Alexa Gonzalez was bored. She enjoyed creating occasional, mindless (and not offensive) art doodles on the canvas known as the school-desk. The school administrator in Forest Hills, NY didn't see it quite the same way. They called it first-degree-criminal doodling and it was punishable with jail time.

Doodling on her desk got Alexa hauled out of school in handcuffs. She did the perp walk in front of her school friends and teachers. Alexa went directly to jail the police precinct and fortunately was released before she spent any time in a jail cell. Alexa and others are now plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the NYC Police for using excessive force in schools. NYPD is in charge of public school safety in the NYC schools.

Zero tolerance policies in some schools seems to have gone wild, like a steroid enhanced version of the original purpose, losing all common sense in the process. Kids are paying a high personal price with this over zealous (and righteous) adherence to a code of conduct that goes way beyond safety and well being.

Alexa Gonzalez will pay the emotional price of her pen and ink crime long beyond the actual event. What is the matter with the adults in her school? Have they no ability to differentiate between dangerous actions and a kid being a kid?

As a parent of a doodling child, I shudder to think what might have befallen the girl had these policies been in place. My daughter's entire 4th grade year was spent doodling on the desk. Every night the patient janitor would wipe it clean. She began to doodle just for the janitor's entertainment, hoping he would appreciate the gesture before wiping it clean. Little did he know he was wiping away the artwork of a future artist whose works hang all over the globe.

As a toddler sized doodler, she began her vocation by using the industrial sized jar of Vaseline, painting it onto the walls, floors, her infant sister (who remained asleep) and every stick of furniture in their room. Nap time apparently had a different sort of meaning to her.

We went through crayon, markers, chalk, ink, paint, and my favorite, spaghetti sauce through those early years.

She doodled her way into early cartooning and one Sunday morning while reading the paper I noticed a familiar set of ink lines. A kindergarten teacher had sent in a cartoon doodle to the newspaper and they published it. It was an early self portrait - she is walking a dog on a leash. The head of the dog is clearly her little sister.

And that describes their relationship in pen and ink.

In 5th grade she did another self portrait. Black ink. Think early Kahlo meets Picasso. We were summoned to the school to reassure a nervous counselor that the child was pretty well adjusted. However, they did send us a thank you note when we moved to another coast a short time later.

All this was just the practice run for her real life. One can only imagine the darkness that would have befallen her career as an artist had she been perp-walked away as a young teen, in handcuffs like Alexa Gonzalez.

Ms. Gonzalez deserves not only an apology, but some new ink pens.

Zero tolerance gone awry?

Indeed.

I'm sorry...but have people gone insane?

[xequar]

Yes, yes they have.

There's a big big push underway to erase any signs of individuality in children. Any kid that does show a spark of individuality is either drugged up to the point where they're mindless drones or turned over to police, who now enforce minor school rules in the same fashion as they would a first-degree felony. In either case, the kid winds up with a record that makes it that much easier for any overzealous cop to arrest that person as an adult and lock them away forever because, loe and behold, he/she has a record.

If you logically connect some not-so-disparate dots, you wind up in the realm of what most people would call conspiracy theory. Many prisons are now privately-run outfits ran on a for-profit basis. If no one goes to prison, the companies running the prisons make no money. Of course, this criminalization of kids makes it all the easier to send them to prison as adults. It also makes it a whole lot easier to create a police-state when the citizenry has grown up thinking it's completely normal to be tracked and monitored at all times and that it's completely acceptable that if anyone steps ever-so-slightly out-of-line that they have a run-in with police.

Yes, the world has gone crazy, and some very creative opportunists have managed to parlay a few disparate tragedies into very lucrative businesses based on a phony fear that the guy in front of you in the line at Taco Bell will snatch your kid if you lose sight of him/her for more than two seconds.

Much like marijuana, a drug that's less harmful to society than cigarettes, was criminalized to make it easier to arrest black people in the 1930s, many minor things are being criminalized now to make it that much easier to arrest malcontents and others who might have the audacity to show a spark of independant human thought.

And it's fucking scary.

[Connor22]

wow now that's a conspiracy theory^ let's just hope that was a one off and some lessons might possibly learned like, oh I don't know... don't arrest kids for being kids?

[xequar]

Originally Posted by Connor22

wow now that's a conspiracy theory^ let's just hope that was a one off and some lessons might possibly learned like, oh I don't know... don't arrest kids for being kids?

The trouble is that it's not a one-off instance. There are all sorts of stories out there about kids being arrested for stupid crap. One of the more recent ones I saw involved a kid that had a small plastic gun that was a piece of an action figure. The kid was kicked out of school and charged with bringing a gun to school.

[Strawberry]

"First-degree-criminal doodling"? LOL.

But yeah, that's insanely ridiculous. There's a huge, huuuuge difference between doodling on a desk and doing something dangerous like bringing drugs or guns to school. People are so dumb.

[Austin]

Maybe they shouldn't have been drawing on the desk... but detention or something would be sufficient punishment.

[Lexington]

Well, zero-tolerance IS going to go way overboard. If it didn't, it'd be called "minimal tolerance".

It's often a pendulum. Somebody does something horrible in a school, and parents and teachers and other students do that "somebody needs to do something" routine. They implement a zero-tolerance policy, and (most) everybody applauds that they're cracking down on whatever the heck it is they're cracking down on. And then somebody gets a heavy sentence for something exceptionally minor, and people get up-in-arms about this horribly restrictive zero-tolerance policy. It gets amended, and everybody's happy. And the cycle repeats.

Lex

[Owen]

Originally Posted by Connor22

wow now that's a conspiracy theory^

Sadly, it's the most logical explanation for this nonsense that I have ever heard.

[crystaltriforce]

there is a school nearby me that's getting a lot of heat because they spied illegally on their students through the web cams on the lap tops they gave the students

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/br...er_Merion.html

[Chandra]

Originally Posted by xequar

There's a big big push underway to erase any signs of individuality in children.

Every person involved in education in any way should mandatorily have to watch this video:

+ YouTube Video

[dromadus]

"O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't!"

Brave New World: Aldous Huxley, 1932

I assume you get the cynicism I share with Huxley. Thank you for the warning.

[Brad]

No i don't believe in arresting children for such things however i think a child spending their entire class vandalizing school property is something that shouldn't be acceptable or encouraged.

Originally Posted by xequar

The trouble is that it's not a one-off instance. There are all sorts of stories out there about kids being arrested for stupid crap. One of the more recent ones I saw involved a kid that had a small plastic gun that was a piece of an action figure. The kid was kicked out of school and charged with bringing a gun to school.

For some reason if it was from an action figure the gun being less than half an inch then i don't believe what you said. However if you meant to just say it was a plastic toy gun then i do have something to say.

A child bringing a plastic gun to school is still something serious. The most likely reason to do so is to use it to threaten people who are unaware that it is fake. Which i do believe expulsion is harsh if it was the first time that child had acted aggressively however anything short of a suspension wouldn't have been enough. As for being charged with bringing a weapon to school, that would never actually happen if the weapon he had wasn't real. So even if he was arrested initially he would have been let go as soon as they knew the weapon was fake.

[xequar]

Originally Posted by Brad

No i don't believe in arresting children for such things however i think a child spending their entire class vandalizing school property is something that shouldn't be acceptable or encouraged.

For some reason if it was from an action figure the gun being less than half an inch then i don't believe what you said. However if you meant to just say it was a plastic toy gun then i do have something to say.

A child bringing a plastic gun to school is still something serious. The most likely reason to do so is to use it to threaten people who are unaware that it is fake. Which i do believe expulsion is harsh if it was the first time that child had acted aggressively however anything short of a suspension wouldn't have been enough. As for being charged with bringing a weapon to school, that would never actually happen if the weapon he had wasn't real. So even if he was arrested initially he would have been let go as soon as they knew the weapon was fake.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?ni...g=6578,3289724

Originally Posted by an excerpt from the article

The Seattle School District's zero-tolerance weapons policy even extends to that 11-inch-tall warrior, G.I. Joe.

Just ask 10-year-old Jeffery Parks, who was expelled from John Rogers Elementary School on Monday after he took the action figure's handgun to school.

The molded plastic pistol is about an inch long.

Edit: I don't think this is the same episode of which I was thinking, as this one was from '97. That said, the point's still the same. They were going to make a criminal out of a kid for an obvious bit of plastic that was shaped as a gun. How fucking stupid!

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Or, how's about this one from last month, when a student had guns legally stowed in his vehicle and parked on a public street, but was STILL expelled from school.

http://www.sacbee.com/2010/01/22/248...-expelled.html

Or here's one from a year ago where a student was nearly expelled for having a NERF toy. How is a NERF TOY a dangerous weapon?

http://www.10tv.com/live/content/loc...f.html?sid=102