Update 30 April 2004: Perry gets the benefit of some tolerance (at bottom of post)
Alexandria Superintendent Busted For Drunk Driving
Schools Chief’s Arrest Sparks Criticism, Support
Alexandria School Chief, Board Discuss DWI Charge
Zero Tolerance — For Mistakes or Second Chances
Last Friday, Alexandria City Public Schools Superintendent Rebecca Perry was arrested for driving drunk. Her blood alcohol level was 150% of the legal limit.
Perry became the city’s first female superintendent when she took the job in August 2001. She had previously been superintendent in Mecklenburg County in Southside Virginia and had spent 21 years in Fauquier County public schools as a teacher and administrator.
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Graduating 15-year-old told she cannot attend high school prom
Zahra Nasr-Azadani started the year as a sophomore but aquired enough credits to jump a year and is an effective junior now. She’s actually in a position to graduate completely and has petitioned to do so. This being her last year in high school she wanted to go to the prom. No dice.
The Emporia School Board rejected a request from 15-year-old Zahra Nasr-Azadani, who appealed a school policy that allows only juniors and seniors to participate in the prom.
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The board consulted with the school’s student council, and the junior class decided not to make an exception, saying the prom is only open to students who enter the school year as juniors or seniors.
An exception to the policy had been given previously to a student in the same position but not this time. Zahra and her 4.0 average will be sitting at home on prom night.
Lee school officials stand in our way
News-Press is trying to get a look at the public records of 710 school bus drivers.
[Verna Jungferman] is the driver who, on March 30, ran her bus off the road, rumbled through a grassy field and then asked her middle school passengers to keep the misadventure hush-hush. Some were hurt and when they started showing up at the school nurse�s office, the bus driver was found out.
The News-Press reporter Charles Runnells studied Jungferman�s school personnel record the next day, discovering and reporting that she had violated school policy 20 times before, had been fired and then rehired.
This news came after a series of other serious bus-driver mistakes: One ran a stop sign and crashed; two others had left young children on the bus after running their routes.
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Updated 23 April 2004: Additional info on the cookie threatening incident.
Updated 28 April 2004: Cookie bandit’s suspension set at one month. (At bottom of post)
N.J. Boy Suspended Over Peanut Allergy
Jules Gabriel was suspended on April 2 and will remain suspended until at least May 13. His crime was possession of a deadly weapon - a snack pack of Nutter Butters. You see his teacher is allergic to peanuts and Jules told a classmate that he had “something dangerous”. Putting two and two together it’s easy to see how the twelve year-old peanut butter cookie holding student was a clear and present danger to his teacher.
School district officials declined to comment Thursday.
Of course they did. Just what could they possibly say? “Yes, we indefinitely suspended a 6th grader because he had cookies in his lunch box.”
Ingestion of even a morsel of peanut can cause people who are allergic to suffer severe reactions, from throat irritation to death.
That depends on how severely allergic the person is. It also requires ingestion. Let’s assume that an adult person with a severe peanut allergy has the sense and experience to recognize the world’s most famous peanut butter sandwich cookie as a possible source of peanuts. That’s not too difficult seeing as it looks like a peanut, smells like peanuts and has peanut butter between it’s peanut-like wafers. If Jules really wanted to harm his teacher with these cookies he would have to physically subdue the teacher and force feed him some Nutter Butters.
Completely and utterly ridiculous.
(Tip credit to Daniel Haus)
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Secret Service questions student on drawings
Political cartoonists take note. Caricatures might not be enough any longer.
Secret Service agents questioned a high school student about anti-war drawings he did for an art class, one of which depicted President Bush’s head on a stick.
Another pencil-and-ink drawing portrayed Bush as a devil launching a missile, with a caption reading “End the war — on terrorism.”
The 15-year-old boy’s art teacher at Prosser High School turned the drawings over to school administrators, who notified police, who called the Secret Service.
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School bans solid T-shirts to counter gangs
We’ve previously chronicled various schools who fear the color pink. Who would have thought that there would be a school afraid of all colors?
Northridge Middle School is banning a staple of the teenage wardrobe: solid-colored T-shirts.
Principal Tom Bridges said he is especially concerned about students coordinating their shirt colors because it might indicate gang activity at the northeast Charlotte school.
“We’d heard on Thursday that there might be something happening Friday with kids wearing white T-shirts,” Bridges said. “It was a small number of kids, but we decided to deal with it.”
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Five years on, Columbine offers lasting safety lessons
The most frequent question that I am asked about zero tolerance is if these policies are all because of Columbine. The simple answer is “yes and no”. There were zero tolerance policies in effect well before Columbine became a name known to everybody in America. Columbine was only five years ago, Congress passed its first federal zero tolerance mandates in 1990 (The Gun Free Schools Act of 1990 was later ruled unconstitutional). Another Gun-Free Schools Act was crafted in 1994. These federal policies and the state and local policies they mandated were already in effect when Klebold and Harris went on their murderous rampage in 1999 and they did absolutely nothing to stop the killers.
What Columbine did wasn’t to start the zero tolerance perfusion but to make these policies seem attractive to an unprecedented degree. Politicians were put on the spot to “stop school violence NOW”. Zero tolerance policies became a very popular method for politicians and administrators to show how dedicated and committed they were to solving the problem. Zero tolerance policies were adopted as quick fix, one size fits all solutions. Quite naturally they have failed abysmally.
National headlines were made when hapless students were expelled on drug charges for sharing a Midol tablet. Pink water pistols were suddenly weapons-grade. A faint air of ludicrousness began to surround zero tolerance. That’s unfortunate, says [Russell Skiba of Indiana’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy], because it detracts from the more critical issue.
“We have no evidence whatsoever that the use of zero tolerance has (succeeded),” says Skiba. “The data points the other direction. (These policies) have a negative effect. We see racial disparities we can’t explain. We see correlations between use of suspensions/expulsions and drop-outs, suspensions/expulsions and juvenile incarceration.”
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Sugar Land seventh grader charged with felony for writing on desk
A twelve year-old writes some nasty stuff on a desk at school. A normal response might be to have him clean the desk. Maybe give him a day of detention if the stuff was really profane. Not in Sugar Land.
James Tyler Frazier is a 12-year-old seventh grader. Back in February, he wrote bad words on his desk at Garcia Middle School in Ft. Bend County. The school’s police made a report and turned it over to the district attorney’s office. To everyone’s surprise, that’s when a third degree felony was filed against the youngster for gang graffiti.
Desk graffiti is a 3rd degree felony? What sort of school requests prosecution of a twelve year old for desk graffiti? I guess the sort that has their own private police force and needs constant validation for having it.
The graffiti was removed from the desk with cleaning solution. It’s a shame that the school wants it to permanently stain James Frazier.
(Tip credit to Bettina)
Todd handed 30-day deferred prosecution in inhaler case
Michael Dugan Todd is a 16 year-old Magnolia High School student who did something stupid. He sprayed his asthma inhaler and his teacher caught a huff of it. She had an allergic reaction and was hospitalized. Todd was charged with deadly conduct, reckless behavior and assault on a public servant (a 3rd-degree felony).
Todd was offered deferred prosecution and probation but that was refused because of a particularly insulting requirement that his mother attend remedial parenting classes. Ninth state District Court Judge Fred Edwards used his judicial discretion to resolve the case without the petty slap in the face.
“This is a little unusual situation,” he said. “The juvenile system allows the court to defer prosecution. I can set whatever conditions I so choose.”
In “the interest of justice,” Edwards ordered the case to be deferred to no more than 30 days and said McCreary would not be required to attend parenting classes.
Todd, however, will have to write three letters of apology: one to Anders, one to his mother and one to his fellow students at Magnolia High School. If he meets those conditions, he will not be prosecuted.
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9th Grader Charged with Sexual Abuse
A Utah teen has been charged with 60 counts of child sex abuse. Some of the instances sited happened within the school itself and date back up to six months. The DA is curious why it took so long for them to be reported.
The school district says it had no idea so many charges were pending against the teenager.
They didn’t feel compelled to report child sexual abuse because they didn’t know how many times this kid had done it? It’s okay not to report sex crimes by your students as long as you don’t think they’re doing it very often?
That district needs a reality check and it needs to come in the form of firings. How many of the sexual assaults would have been prevented if the school system had reported the ones that happened six months ago? What sort of culture of silence is there where a teen can rack up 60 child sex assaults before being charged?
(Tip credit to Jonathan D. Jewell)
