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.
As reported in Fort Bend Now, a student at the Houston-area Clements High School has been arrested and banned from graduation because he used the layout of his school in creating a map for a 3D first-person shooter video game. As if that wasn’t enough lunacy, a search of his house resulting in finding a hammer in his bedroom - he apparently had it in there so he could fix his bed. The hammer was confiscated as a potential weapon. The student has been determined a “terroristic threat.”
As an important side note, I should point out that terroristic threatening is not associated with terrorism. The term was in use long before domestic terrorism was brought to the forefront of national attention with the attacks of September 11, 2001. A friend of mine in Atlanta that has occasionally worked as a bartender clued me into this particular legal term some years ago. A terroristic threat can be as simple as saying, “Stop it or I’ll punch you in the nose.” Interestingly enough, a terroristic threat is in some jurisdictions a more serious crime than battery. Thus, if you really feel you must punch someone in the nose, you’re commiting one less crime, and a less serious one, if you don’t first tell your intended target.
While I’m writing about my friends, I have another friend in Birmingham that does 3D modeling as part of a career in artwork. He was commissioned to make a 3D model of a real hydroelectric dam as part of a game that let children explore the environment on and around the dam. He used the Unreal game engine and it’s likely that’s what this unfortunate student was using, as that’s arguably the top 3D modeling engine for gaming around.
Generating environments for 3D games is hard work. Shortcuts like using existing buildings, guaranteed to have realistic layouts, is an incredibly common part of getting such a project complete. I recall that when the Xbox 360 came out, one of the game publishers (I’m not remembering which one) was including in promotional materials a description of how they scoured the city for great textures they could photograph and use in the game, like doors and walls with rust, grafitti, and general wear-and-tear. The resulting games were more realistic because of it.
Basically, this kid is being punished for taking a common shortcut aiding in realism when doing intelligent software design work of the sort he could otherwise be highly paid to do shortly after his (now suspended) graduation. Or even now, had he delivered his designs via Second Life instead of via a video game.
That he’s Chinese (bringing up immediate thoughts of the Virginia Tech massacre - after all, Chinese and Koreans all look the same to the paranoid) and that school board elections are only days away undoubtedly add to the furor.
Schools taken to task over law
Last year the Texas legislature passed a law specifically granting school administrators discretion to consider circumstances surrounding a scholastic rules violation and the history of the offender. It seems that the administrators really don’t want this discretion and they are pulling their zero tolerance blankets over their heads.
John Tverbakk, the father of a 13-year-old honor roll student at Cook Middle School in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, thinks school officials ignored a new law intended to relax zero-tolerance policies when they sent his daughter to an alternative school for six weeks for holding a 1-ounce test tube of beer.
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“The student said it was Corona, and Veronica thought she was joking, so she held it and pretended to drink it and handed it back to the girl,” Tverbakk said.
(more…)
Students suspended for paper gun
Destiny Thomas, an 11 year-old student at Amber Terrace Intermediate School in the Desoto Independent School District, folded a piece of paper into the shape of a gun. She and two classmates were suspended and sentenced to 30 days of alternative school for their flagrant violation of district anti-gun policies.
Destiny said she made the paper gun after a fellow classmate at Amber Terrace Intermediate School in Desoto showed her how to fold a computer paper. She said she had no intention of doing anything that would get her kicked out of school.
“I know not to bring a real gun, but I didn’t think a paper gun would get you in trouble,” Thomas said.
Desoto school officials said the student code of conduct clearly states no weapons or replica of weapons are allowed on campus.
District officials reviewed the case the next day and revoked the punishment. All three students will be allowed to return to class. While I am glad that this was caught at the district level I am appalled that it ever got there.
A replica is defined as an exact reproduction, a copy exact in all details. A folded piece of paper is not a replica weapon in any sense of the word. The administers at Amber Terrace weren’t trying to make their school a safer place. They were engaged in thought control - punishing pre-teens for engaging a concept that the officials disapprove.
Contact Information:
Amber Terrace Principal Kim Scoggins
District Superintendent Alton Frailey
School Board President Dr. Janice Pettis Ingram
School Board Vice President Dee Trimble
School Board Secretary Sharon Sternes
School Board Member Donald Gant
School Board Member Kenneth Graves
School Board Member Kurt Krohn
School Board Member Rhonda Lemons
(Tip credit to David Richmond)
Proposal could make it easier to expel HISD students
Texas recently celebrated a legal victory against zero tolerance policies. Legislation signed into law gave school boards explicit ability to review cases on a merit basis instead of using a look-up table of mandatory punishments. Many school systems immediately moved to take advantage of this to update their due process procedures and revise their codes of conduct. Signs that pointed to the Houston Independent School District taking the same path were apparently false as the district is instead implementing new zero tolerance policies.
Simply put, it makes it simpler to expel students.
Before all the students within the Houston Independent School District walk the hallways again, HISD wants a new, tougher conduct code in place.
“And we’ll continue to make the code of student conduct tougher when we find the need to do that,” said Terry Abbott, HISD spokesman.
There are three new zero tolerance policies going into effect. Any student who creates a “hit list”, recruits a “gang member” or engages in “high tech cheating” will be automatically expelled. Scare quotes are used around each of those terms because they are genuinely scary. The terms are not defined so they will apply or not as administrators choose.
Contact Information:
School Board President Dianne Johnson
School Board general delivery
Parents weigh in on zero tolerance
Updated 03 May 2005: Zero Tolerance reform bill passes Texas House.
Updated 06 June 2005: Bill approved by State Sentate, now awaiting Governor’s signature.
Updated 24 June 2005: Perry signs bill into Texas law. Details at bottom of post.
Texas lawmakers are looking at revamping laws about school discipline. Concerned parents are taking opportunity of their willingness to listen.
Critics say this policy gives school districts the green light to impose strict, uniform penalties for misbehavior without considering extenuating circumstances such as the students’ intent to do harm or prior disciplinary records.
Fred Hink of Katy Zero Tolerance, a group dedicated to protecting parents’ rights in the discipline process, said these practices not only lack common sense, they do not appropriately address issues such as disability considerations, due process and the long-range effects of placing children in alternative education programs.
(more…)
Anorexic student denied valedictorian title
Karen Scherr has been the top academic performance at Kingwood High School (Humble Independent School District) for four years running. Having the highest marks in the school won’t get her the Valedictorian title at this year’s graduation though. She has been denied the coveted senior honor for missing an attendance date in her junior year.
“I was disappointed,†said Scherr. “I’d hoped the rule would not have to be enforced.â€Â
Scherr was referring to a requirement that the school’s valedictorian be enrolled in classes by the 20th day of their junior year.
It’s a rule aimed at keeping students from other schools from transferring into Kingwood late in their high school careers to claim one of the coveted top 10 academic spots.
Scherr’s been in the Kingwood school system since kindergarten. But she wasn’t enrolled in her high school on that 20th day of her junior year.
Instead, she was in a treatment facility seeking help for the eating disorder, anorexia nervosa.
This boils down to a failure in logic. The rule is in place for a specific case - to prevent late enrollees in the system from taking the highest honors in the school. In this specific case the student passes the case. The rule itself fails to pass the case. A logical administration would recognize the case and modify the rule. This administration chose to engage a classic logical fallacy - Traditional Wisdom. Specifically, “The rule must be adhered to because we have followed the rule in the past”.
Contact information:
Principal Paula Almond
Superintendent Dr. Guy Sconzo
Deputy Superintendent John Miller
Board of Trustees President John B. Graves
Board of Trustees Vice President Dr. Bonnie Longnion
Board of Trustees Secretary Mike Sullivan
Board of Trustees Parliamentarian Jim Eggers
Board of Trustees Member Dave Martin
Board of Trustees Member Dr. Aaron B. Clevenson
Board of Trustees Member Lynn Fields
(Tip credit to Bob Jones, Rena Lowe and Annika Klein)
‘Hit list’ case handled well
This is not a satire piece. Believe it or not, a student in the Crosby Independent School District was found with a list of students and teachers under the heading “kill”. She was neither arrested nor expelled.
[Superintendent Don] Hendrix supported an assistant principal who sent the girl home Tuesday afternoon on the bus before being able to reach a district police officer.
Hendrix suspended the girl pending an investigation. Thursday he decided to put her in the district’s alternative center for the few weeks that remain in this school year and to welcome her back to regular classes in the fall.
He hopes by that time some progress will be made in helping the girl, a social misfit who is teased, sometimes cruelly, by other students.
No police? No expulsion? No letter home to the parents or bringing in grief counselors? Who the heck is this guy and, more importantly, can we clone him?
Actually, Hendrix created a “zero tolerance” policy for Crosby School District about 10 years before the shootings at Columbine in 1999.
When he arrived at Crosby, fights were an almost daily occurrence at the district’s high school, often provoked by verbal hostility that included swearing and racial and sexual harassment.
Hendrix declared zero tolerance for four offenses: racial slurs, cursing another student, sexual harassment and fighting.
(more…)
Hey kid, step away from the knitting needles
Say you are a 12 year-old student. You’ve finished your TAKS test with hours to spare. What do you do? If you are at Kealing Middle School in the Austin Independent School District you better not take out your plastic knitting needles because those are deadly weapons according to the school’s zero tolerance policy.
“[Mariel Polter] had two hours on her hands, and she’s knitting little spring scarves for this arts and crafts show,” explained Robbin Polter, Mariel’s mom. She says Mariel and her pals on the swim team are really into knitting.
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The teacher in Mariel’s classroom … got on the phone to Mom to tell her that her daughter had brought knitting needles to school. See, the knitting needles were considered potentially dangerous weapons under the school’s zero-tolerance policy.
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“He got on the phone and said, ‘Are you aware that Mariel has brought knitting needles to school?’ ” Robbin Polter recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, I knew she had TAKS, and she thought she was just burning up some time.’ Then he sort of realized how stupid it was, and he said, ‘I don’t really worry about Mariel, but Kealing has a zero tolerance policy.’ I said, ‘I didn’t realize that would be a problem, but could you just hold on to them for her until after school?’ “
(more…)
District to require parents to attend drug seminars
Updated 28 March 2005: Board of Trustees member offers clarification. Details at bottom of post.
The Carroll Independent School District will soon require that parents of students involved in extra-curricular activities attend teen substance abuse seminars. If the parents refuse, the students will not be allowed to participate in non-academic programs.
The policy starts next school year at the Carroll Independent School District in the Fort Worth suburb of Southlake. It’ll affect the parents of students in grades seven through 12 — including those of student-athletes.
The classes will address substance-abuse trends, warning signs, prevention and district drug policies.
What is the logic behind this? Shouldn’t the district be requiring students to attend these teen seminars? Why is this rule in effect only for students attending extra-curricular activities? It’s the equivalent of saying that these activities are the cause of teen drug abuse.
District policy is set by the Board of Trustees:
Darla Reed
Dale Crane
Steve Lakin
Deborah Frazier
Erin Shoupp
John Nussrallah
Sherri Williams
(Tip credit to Mark Moss)
(more…)
