ZeroIntelligence.net

An immediate reaction to the article of two Korean boys expelled for an incident on the school bus would be a knee jerk condemnation of the school officials. Instead of going emotional, let’s attempt to ‘smack a boot to their collective heads’ using some reasonable common sense. 

Thoughtless Boys Will Be Thoughtless Boys
In the first paragraph, cultural difference is mentioned as the reason the boys were playing with the airgun in the open. I am of the mindset that is a weak excuse because I am not convinced there is an element of Korean culture that will allow youths to play with toy guns as the boys did on the bus. A more plausible excuse would have been the lack maturity and responsibility from the boys. The simple fact is they behaved improperly on the school bus. 

The next paragraph goes to some detail of the chain of events to what occurred. What grabs my attention is the fact that neither boy was injured from being shot at and a sheet of paper was held as a target. Nothing was said from other students on the bus. Were they terrified, angry, indifferent to the gunplay? No information was given about the airgun, but, my experience (and the article mentions the bottle of blue pellets) suggests it was a spring powered airsoft. A brief lesson of airsofts can be found here.  

Match The Time With The Crime
I think community service is reasonable, but I would have specified assignment to a firearms instructor and gun range as opposed to trash cleanup or some other unrelated task. At a gun range with the firearms instructor, the boys would realize just how important gun safety and etiquette is needed. Ten days is two school weeks lost. Two or three days would have been sufficient. 

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, School Boards of the Stupid
Not satisfied with the two weeks suspension and ignoring most of the boys’ scholastic achievement, the bubble-headed school board expelled them for the first half of their freshman year in a closed session. They claim they were interested for all of the students’ safety. I think it was more irrational fear and loathing of anything resembling in appearance of a firearm or the mere mention of the word in any variation. Too bad the boys did not incite a food fight by mashing quiche muffins into another student’s hair or flinging moon pies across the bus.  

The cultural differences I see are immigrant families striving to get the best education for their children and the public school system too busy protecting their hold of ignorant policies.

There are moments when you hear or read of something so boffo bizzare that the only decent reply is to raise an eyebrow and look unemotionally dumbfounded. My bizarre moment was reading the report of a Colorado school banning the game ‘Tag’. This is not the first school to ban the game as indicated here and here. To be honest, my mind scrambles for the understanding of how other adults actually sit down and think up the most foolish of behavior controls.

Why Ban Tag?
The common excuse given by the school official revolves around either so called safety to prevent collisions or some silly self esteem issue.

Firstly, these are kids with functioning eyesight; either assisted with glasses or without. The kids are not intentionally trying to run into each other. These kids are not male rams butting heads nor are they wandering asteroids that will drift into the paths of each other.

As for the self esteem excuse, for a teacher to invoke it to me demonstrates the pathetic thinking of the adult and not the student. They are not teaching anything but to be a victim of the moment. Is it too much for a teacher or yard supervisor to quietly suggest a playing strategy to the tagger such as chase after the slowest runner? Is it beyond the teachers’ creative ability to explain how the game of tag is similar to how a lion or wolf will chase the prey animal? How about showing a nature video to reinforce the notion how Tag is universal among several species. Humans use it for play while animals use it to feed themselves.

What’s Next on the List to be Banned?
I expect the next playground activities to be banned are “Red Light-Green Light” because of self esteem issues. You ask how? Think like the idiot officials for a moment. The game requires you to listen to the caller shout out either color. The discrimination occurs because a deaf student can not hear the shouts. Never mind that the deaf student should be able to follow along with the other players in knowing when to move and freeze.

Another banned activity could be “jump rope.” You ask how? Grit your teeth through the pain and think like an idiot official a little longer. One of the students might get the idea, after several rounds of jumping, to snap the rope in the same manner as using a whip on another student or to try to swing from the top of the jungle gym. Jump ropes could easily get classified as weapons. 

It is hard enough being a kid without the misguided buffoonery of public school education professionals.

KOLD News in Tuscon, Arizona reports on a 13-year-old Queen Creek boy who was suspended from Payne Junior High School after he drew guns on some papers. The school district filed paperwork saying the boy was drawing guns on his homework. School administrators say they will suspend anyone accused of threatening a teacher and/or student.

That’s right - DRAWING a gun - like with a pencil ya know?  Reports like this just amaze me.

The crime rate in my neck of the woods has skyrocketed with 80% of the violent offenders 18 years old and under.  That’s right - under 18 with an average age of 15.  And the guns these kids are drawing certainly are not on paper.

Our schools, educational institutions, are to EDUCATE.  I know I was taught to express myself in NON-VIOLENT ways.  We were encouraged to write, draw - yes draw, sing, whatever you felt comfortable with doing.  It hurts my head when I try to rationalize these “educators” policies and enforcements.  They have lost their vision (if they ever had any at all).  They are not seeing the trees for the forest.

Ask yourself, what did this teach this child?  Let’s see - it taught him to be very careful when expressing his creativity; it taught him that one little doodle drawn in just the right place will get him a three day vacation.  What 13 year old wouldn’t relish in three days at home, alone (because both parents work), to play his Xbox at will?  C’mon.  This is clearly a violation of his consitutional rights. What does this teach him about respect?  I’m willing to bet he’s is more than a little confused in that area.  Hopefully his parents will take this unpleasant experience and use it as a learning tool for a civics lesson.  I know if it was my child, that’s what I would do.

Zero tolerance - zero tolerance indeed.  Time for some zero tolerance on people who have no common sense.

Hypocrisy.

As defined by dictionary.com, hypocrisy is a “pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.” That word has surfaced, yet again, as the first vocabulary word for the new school year in South Florida.

New Florida Teachers Website
As the first day of school was the headline news of the day, The Florida Department of Education, the State School Board if you will, unceremoniously put a new piece of it’s website online. The Board decided in July to publicly post its Disciplinary Actions Taken on Educators and their licenses. The local paper reported a week earlier that this website was coming and will be posted on the first day of school. That was the last you heard from the local papers. Why? Because the elected hypocrites have the media in South Florida in their pockets. Controlled like puppets.

To see the list for yourself, go to myfloridateacher.com. It’s a catchy name, although I certainly would not be quick to admit any of these “teachers” were mine. Simply click the search button and you will be provided the entire state list and plenty of water cooler talk for months to come.

Those Crazy Teachers
Welfare fraud, accessing pornographic websites on school computers, child abuse and neglect, and plenty of grand theft charges will have your mouth dropping. DUI’s and drug possession are commonplace, some with multiple counts of DUI. The majority of “Final Orders” are simply letters of reprimand and various, small fines. There is no consistency within these Final Orders. The Final Order on the same complaint of “possession of marijuana” can range from revocation to a letter of reprimand.

Where’s the Zero Tolerance Now?
How does this affect zero tolerance rules in our schools? Parents whose children have been excessively or unfairly punished by local School Boards may need to take an extra blood pressure pill before perusing this list. Back in March, 2005 we published an article about Lynn Deering, a high school anatomy teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida. The “incident” involved an 11 inch knife and the “stabbing” of a stack of papers on a student’s desk. We all have common sense.

Common sense tells us that this individual has no right to be in charge of children - especially when those children are teenagers. If a child in that classroom had committed the very same act, he would have been escorted out in handcuffs and splashed all over page one in the papers. Right? Well, wasn’t that what happened to Deering?

Slapping the Wrist
Actually, no. The complaint was “Reckless Display of a Weapon” and “Inappropriate Conduct with Students“. The disposition (or Final Order) on this case was just decided on 7/31/07 - two years later. I hope you’re sitting down, the final order was a Letter of Reprimand and a $250.00 fine! Move on, pay your fine over there, next in line please.

Fair? Certainly not. Next question? Was this Deering charged by local law enforcement? Continuing research of the public records in Broward County has turned up nothing in the court system as yet. If I ever find a case I will certainly share with all but I do not believe that will happen. Was this Deering fired? Don’t know. But if this had been a student, one can bet the parents would still be paying enormous legal fees as the case winds its way through the justice system.

Just remember your word for the day: hypocrisy.

I received an email from an anonymous correspondent claiming to be a school administrator disgusted with the effects of zero tolerance. I debated with myself about the appropriateness of posting these stories as there are no specifics I can use to corroborate them. It could all be a clever fiction. In the end, I decided to go ahead and give these stories from “Job Line” to readers for their consideration, but with this leading disclaimer, as he or she could just as easily posted them to comments.

So, without further preamble, consider what he or she has to say:

I have a few zero tolerance stories to tell as a school administrator. I am not revealing my identity to protect my job. Meanwhile, violent students continue with their violence with or without zero tolerance policies.

Story #1
As an assistant principal, one of my duties was supervision of the lunchroom. One day, a boy approached me and said a boy at his table had a knife. The boy knew about the zero intelligence rule the district had. I approached the table and a moderately mentally handicapped boy showed me his 1″ long plastic GI Joe knife. I took it from him and told him he shouldn’t even bring toy guns to school. That was going to be the end of it but somehow the principal found out and reamed me for not suspending the student and requesting expulsion. He ordered me to suspend the student for 10 days pending an expulsion hearing. Being that he was special education, we had a manifestation hearing to determine if his disability was related to the offense. Because I was the case conference coordinator, I made sure the determination was that the offense was related. The punishment then became only the 10 day period. I never forgave the principal for this and left at the end of that school year.

Story #2
This took place while I was a principal. The school board in all its wisdom said that they needed to be tough on violence and adopted a zero tolerance policy. I spoke against it, but they were more interested in putting on a good show for the media. A straight-A student was in the computer lab and came across a website that had recipes for making bombs. He said to his friend. “I can’t believe it. Someone could really make a bomb out of this and hurt someone.” The teacher overheard him and printed off the page. Because word gets around in this district, all the board members found out about it before the end of the day. Of course I was ordered to suspend the student pending an expulsion hearing. At the expulsion hearing, the woman thankfully brought along a lawyer who told them that if this child was expelled, he was planning on multiple lawsuits against the district and individual board members. Because he could prove they were discussing private information about this child in public, they were violating FERPA laws. He succeeded in getting this boy off with just a 10 day suspension.

Meanwhile, the son of one of these board members sexually assaulted a girl on campus. The board told me that if I suspended the boy longer than 3 days, I would be looking for another job.

Story #3
This was another that occurred while I was principal. Another great student on the honor roll had a boy scout camp-out the previous weekend. He forgot about the pocket knife he had in his jacket from the camp-out. When he found out, he brought the knife to the office. Unfortunately, a person in the office who saw this contacted a board member and once again, I was required to suspend this boy for 10 days and recommend expulsion. The story ended up good because they put the boy in a home-school cooperative and the boy re-entered school as a junior in high school. He graduated with honors.

I was sure I’d written about this when it happened, but a search of the archives says otherwise. Some months back, a girl was disciplined for violating a public school’s dress code because she wore a denim skirt and socks with a picture of Tigger on them. The dress code was instituted by the school in an effort to reduce gang-related violence by prohibiting denim, multi-colored clothing, and solid colors outside of a fairly narrow set of choices.

Expecting gang members to avoid gang-related activities simply because they are no longer allowed to wear what they would otherwise wear seems far-fetched. If I were running a gang, I would simply find some other indicator that doesn’t violate the policy but still allows my gang members to identify each other. Disciplining children who violate the policy who are clearly not wearing clothes that are some kind of gang marker is just asinine - a simple note home reiterating the dress code should be sufficient.

The school, in Napa, California, has since found itself in a legal battle with the ACLU. The lawsuit seeks to eliminate the dress code altogether as a violation of First Amendment free speech rights. I doubt that a dress code enforced in a more realistic manner would have necessarily triggered such a lawsuit. In all likelihood, the dress code will be going away.

More details on this update can be found in the San Jose Mercury News.

The Houston Chronicle reports that a girl in Katy, Texas has received a mandatory four-month assignment to an alternative school. She wrote “I love Alex” on a gym wall with a Sharpie. That’s graffiti and a level 4 offense. Under zero tolerance rules, that makes it the same as if she found Alex and beat him with a pipe.

The zero tolerance interpretation seems to exceed state law in this case:

[School district spokesman Steve] Stanford, who said he could not discuss the specifics of the case because of privacy laws, defended the punishment, saying the district had no choice.

But Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, disagreed. Eissler co-authored House Bill 603 in 2005, which gives administrators more latitude to consider disciplinary history, intent, whether a student has a disability that would impair judgment or acted in self-defense in deciding punishment.

“They have all the leeway they want,” he said. “They didn’t have to hammer this young lady the way they did. That’s why I wrote HB 603 — to give school districts authority to back off the black-and-white justice.”

Stanford said he is confident the district is following the law.

So the legislator that wrote the law says the district is going too far while the district says they are following the law. I suppose the district is technically correct in the they don’t have to pass down such a harsh punishment, but can and did. This really sounds to me as though someone got a bug in their bonnet about graffiti and decided that the next incident, no matter who it would be, was going to get the maximum punishment possible as a lesson to everyone else. That’s not just arbitrary, it’s thoughtless and unlikely to generate the desired result.

The Supreme Court recently heard Morse v. Frederick, which captured the attention of the general public because of the appeal of how most people know it: the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case. In essence, the Court’s ruling has strengthened the powers of discipline on the part of school administrators by holding that the First Amendment guarantees of free speech do not hold for public school students when that speech promotes illegal drug use.

One might think that this column would be disappointed, but the opinions of the 5-4 majority in this case are based on principles we actually support. Discipline of students that have in some way threatened the safety of others or disrupted the educational process is an important part of teaching those children to be positive contributors to our greater society. Rather, our objection is to the transfer of intelligent and appropriate discipline to a mindless application of zero tolerance policies that cast the disciplinary net too wide and know no difference between the harmless play of children and the malevolence of true juvenile delinquents. Thus do little green army men and real, loaded guns brought to school as a threat or tool for harm become equally offensive, administrators lose all credibility, and children lose instead of learn.

The Supreme Court did not explicitly address zero tolerence, but in a majority concurring opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, “Students will test the limits of acceptable behavior in myriad ways better known to schoolteachers than to judges; school officials need a degree of flexible authority to respond to disciplinary challenges; and the law has always considered the relationship between teachers and students special.” Flexible authority is the polar opposite of zero tolerance. We can only hope that public school administrators will listen to Justice Breyer and the Court and come to their senses on this foolish trend.

If you have time, you should really read the entire decision. Justice Breyer’s quote is on page 39. Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion, beginning on page 19, is also an excellent discussion of school discipline.

Paul Clinton of the Daily Breeze reports on an elementary school’s narrow avoidance of a horror only a step shy of another Virginia Tech massacre. Shortly before fifth-grade graduation at the Cornerstone School at Pedregal, the administration discovered that eleven students were planning on bringing military weapons to the event. Fortunately, the safety of the children attending was assured by prompt and decisive action on the part of Principal Denise Leonard (leonardd@mail.pvpusd.k12.ca.us.)

The students were required to clip off the ends of the weapons with scissors. You see, the dangerous weapons were those carried by little green army men mounted, in Cornerstone School tradition, on the mortarboards of the graduating fifth-graders.

Leonard’s diligence helped prevent a major incident in keeping with the school’s zero tolerance policies on weapons and administrative intelligence.

The Washington Post reports today on some nonsense at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna, Virginia. A boy has been disciplined for hugging his girlfriend in violation of the school’s “no touching” rule.

That’s right, no touching, of any sort. According to the rules, hugging your boyfriend or girlfriend violates the rules, as do high-fives, pats on the back, hand-holding, and so on. Hopefully, delivering CPR and the Heimlich Manuever are excluded, although it doesn’t appear to be that way.

From the article: “Deborah Hernandez, Kilmer’s principal, said the rule makes sense in a school that was built for 850 students but houses 1,100. She said that students should have their personal space protected and that many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.” At the end of middle school, you can be assured that they still won’t understand what is acceptable or welcome as they will have less experience interacting with others in a natural environment than is normal.

Consider what other similar bans could be instituted for similar reasons.

No talking: “Students should have their feelings protected from hurtful comments and many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.”

No writing: “Students should have their feelings protected from hurtful writings and many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.”

No looking at each other: “Students should have their feelings protected from disapproving and angry looks and many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.”

I’ve personally encouraged my daughter to consider attending an online high school instead of the public high school, but her main objection is the danger of losing out on opportunities for social interaction. Should rules such as “no touching” expand, the ability to have normal social interaction will go away and her main reason for going to the school will go with it. Why do school adminstrators believe children enter their schools still in need of learning academic subjects, but should already know everything there is to know about proper social interaction?

And to take that question down another path, why are our public schools pushing sex education at younger and younger ages and decrying abstinence education as ineffective, yet pushing some kind of “touch abstinence” answer to activities like handshakes?

Thanks go to Brian McDonald for steering me to this article. As a humorous aside, I think that an article about discipline over a hug could have little better name for the main character than “Hal Beaulieu”. His last name fits the article in a subtle way, much like one I noticed some time ago involving a policeman named Peter Couture.