No Mercy, Kid!

In the name of "zero tolerance," our schools are treating innocent children like criminals.

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• Michael Crowley
• America's Schools

"Zero Tolerance" In High Schools

On a chilly December morning in Houston, Eddie Evans's 12-year-old son hurried out the door in shirt sleeves on his way to the bus stop. Feeling the cold, he ducked back into his house to quickly grab a jacket. It wasn't until he'd gotten inside the school building that he remembered his three-inch pocketknife was still in his coat. Why would a sixth-grader carry a knife? Because he was a Boy Scout and he'd brought it to his last Scout meeting.

After asking a friend what he should do, the boy decided to keep quiet and hide the knife in his locker until the end of the day. But his friend mentioned the knife to a teacher, and school officials called the police. That afternoon, cops arrested the Evans child and took him to a juvenile detention center. "From that point on, my family's life was flipped on its head," the boy's father says.

The boy was suspended from school for 45 days and enrolled in an alternative school for juvenile offenders. Evans says the place was like a boot camp, where his son -- a good student, a youth leader in his church and a First Class Boy Scout -- was so miserable he talked about suicide.

This is yet another chapter in the ongoing madness that is America's "zero tolerance" craze. Schools nowadays are wildly overreacting to any behavior with a whiff of danger or controversy. Some of these policies were a response to rising teen drug use and high-profile school shootings (such as the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999), which led to a wave of tough federal, state and local laws dealing with drugs and guns.

But they've been applied to everything from typical rowdy behavior to innocent missteps. According to a report issued by the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.:

• A 17-year-old in Richmond, Illinois, shot a paper clip with a rubber band, missing his target but hitting a cafeteria worker instead. He was expelled.



• A 12-year-old in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, diagnosed with a hyperactivity disorder, told others in a lunch line not to eat all the potatoes, or "I'm going to get you."
  
  Turned in by the lunch monitor, he was referred by the principal to the police, who charged the boy with making "terroristic threats." The kid spent several weeks in a juvenile detention center.



• A 13-year-old in Denton County, Texas, was assigned in class to write a "scary" Halloween story. He concocted one that involved shooting up a school, which got him a visit from police -- and six days in jail before the courts confirmed that no crime had been committed.

"Zero tolerance has been implemented mindlessly," says education professor Cecil Reynolds of Texas A&M University. "Anytime you take something as complex as the way children behave and apply something simplistic to it, you can't be doing a good job."

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