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But it didn't matter. The knife, spotted during a routine sweep, violated the school's strict policy of "zero tolerance" for weapons. The punishment was automatic: a one-year suspension. In the end, a blitz of publicity helped reduce Hess's suspension to five days. But some other kids aren't as lucky.
Thanks to a nationwide zero-tolerance craze, bizarre incidents like the one in Texas are cropping up everywhere. And few of those victims get the media attention or hire the lawyers they need to fight for justice.
Why are so many harmless kids being treated as if they're terrorists? Columbine. The massacre at that Colorado high school five years ago -- where a pair of kids killed 12 fellow students and one teacher -- deeply shocked parents, teachers and politicians. Local police and school officials apparently missed chilling signs that the two boys were contemplating violence.
But the reaction went way overboard. Media hype, fanned by gun-control groups, made it seem as if classrooms everywhere had become war zones, even as statistics showed that school violence nationwide had declined. And then -- surprise! -- lawyers came rushing in. When Columbine officials got slapped with lawsuits, nobody wanted to risk being blamed for missing the warning signs of another tragedy.
Most schools already had zero-tolerance rules on the books to clamp down on drugs and weapons, but their enforcement suddenly went to bizarre extremes. Students now could be suspended or expelled for possessing almost anything that could be considered a "dangerous weapon" -- like dull bread knives.
Okay, sure, you want to kick out thugs who show up at school with guns and dangerous knives. But just ask the parents of Timiere Crosby if we're sweeping up the right kids. Timiere, who is six -- repeat, six -- was suspended for nearly two weeks from his York, Pennsylvania, school after a weapon fell out of his bag. What was it? Nail clippers.
Or consider the episode in Spokane, Washington, where just this past January three elementary school students were suspended for bringing two-inch-long G.I. Joe guns to school. Toys, for heaven's sake. Then there's the pair of New Jersey eight-year-olds who recently spent five hours at a police station for making "terroristic threats" with a gun ... made of paper.
Zero-tolerance defenders try to dismiss such incidents as freak occurrences. If only. "There are literally thousands of these horror stories," says Russell Skiba, an Indiana University professor who heads a study on safety in schools.
The list goes on and on: an 11-year-old girl in Georgia, suspended for bringing a Tweety Bird key ring with a ten-inch chain to class; a ninth-grader in New Mexico, suspended because her key ring held a one-inch penknife; four New Jersey kindergartners, suspended for apparently "shooting" one another with their fingers in a cops-and-robbers game.
In one case, the dangerous weapon was merely a child's imagination. Rachel Boim was caught last year passing a notebook (which she calls a private journal) to another student in her suburban Atlanta high school. Inside, the 14-year-old had written about an unnamed student who kills a teacher in a dream. That was enough to get Boim, a creative writer with no record of troublemaking, expelled.
One expert justified Boim's expulsion to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by saying that schools "had their 9/11 with Columbine." But after 9/11 no one wanted America to be a police state, and our schools shouldn't become one either.
When liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and conservative legal foundations are in agreement, as they are here, you know something's wrong. It's time we showed some common sense and stopped criminalizing innocent kids. Zero tolerance is making zero sense.
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