I love Alex, I beat Alex, same thing
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.