Zero Tolerance Idiocy

It's not just for public schools, it would seem.

More Zero Tolerance Idiocy

Have the school administrators responsible for this idiocy gotten around to blaming their stupid, lazy actions on lawyers, rather than simply admitting that 'zero tolerance' policies are about avoiding responsibility and accountability for their actions?

Alexa is still suspended from school, her mother said. She and her mom went to family court on Tuesday, where Alexa was assigned eight hours of community service, a book report and an essay on what she learned from the experience.

Alexa Gonzalez no longer faces a suspension for scribbling with a lime green marker, but principal Marilyn Grant told her mother, that agency policy dictated that she calls the cops.

An essay....

"I learned that my Spanish teacher would rather pull a power play than give a student a warning and a bottle of Windex, that my principal is a lazy, officious woman who avoids any application of common sense by pointing to the rule book, and that rather than arresting the idiotic school teachers and administrators who drag them into minor issues that should be resolved within the four walls of the school, some police will happily handcuff and frighten little girls."

Really, though, a last lesson for the girl: this is no time for honesty.

Lazy, Stupid, Dishonest....

And enabled by "tort reformers". Via feministe, a story about a student who may be expelled for taking a birth control pill at school.

School officials say they can't take chances. They are concerned about liability and safety. Any pills, even nonprescription pills, could be shared with another student who has allergies. And it would be difficult to enforce rules if students were allowed to take some pills but not others.

School officials, of course, don't have to take chances. They can ban students from bringing prescription drugs to school, can require that students leave drugs with a school nurse, can require that students bring in their prescriptions, etc., and they can impose reasonable punishments for violation of school rules. But that's not what we're talking about here.

If she had been caught high on LSD, heroin or another illegal drug, she found, she would have been suspended for five days. Taking her prescribed birth-control pill on campus drew the same punishment as bringing a gun to school would have.

That outcome is not made necessary by a fear of "taking chances". It results from lazy administrators who don't want to defend their decisions when called upon to explain why one child got a five day suspension for bringing a single birth control pill to school for her own use, but another got expelled for passing out grandma's hydrocodone to her friends. By the same token, why is it dramatically worse for a student to take a birth control pill at school than to come to school intoxicated - or to take an illegal, intoxicating drug at school, but not be observed with the substance in hand?

The claim of fears of liability are to be expected. It's easy to trot out that excuse for thoughtless "zero tolerance" policies. But how would the school be liable? Clearly it is not at risk of being sued for this student's taking her own prescription medication. But what if she had been passing out birth control pills to her friends, unbeknownst to the school - how would that create any liability for the school? What if she were selling Valium to her friends, or marijuana or heroin, also unbeknownst to the school? How would the school be liable?

Kids sell drugs at school. Kids buy drugs at school. Kids take drugs at school. Where's the rash of lawsuits? Assuming you can find one, how would a "zero tolerance" policy have changed a thing?

"Most people would not know the difference between birth control or some Ritalin or Tylenol or codeine," said Clarence Jones, coordinator for the Fairfax school system's safe and drug-free youth program. "If they are just pulling something out of their pockets and sticking it in their mouths, we don't know what they are taking."

That doesn't mean you have to treat two incidents the same once you find out what they're taking. By way of example, would you also expel a student observed to be taking what turned out to be a tictac?

Reasonable Minds, Indeed....

First the facts:

Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on — black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt — the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade....

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”

The search produced... nothing. But what would justify such a search? Obviously this was an investigation of a horrific crime, right?

An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

Oh my goodness - you say these pills are big, yellow and different? Well then, let's hear from the "experts":

Richard Arum, who teaches sociology and education at New York University, said he would have handled the incident differently. But Professor Arum said the Supreme Court should proceed cautiously.

“Do we really want to encourage cases,” Professor Arum asked, “where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?”

Well, no... But the problem is we live in a country so wrapped up in its "war on drugs" and "zero tolerance" rules that people can actually delude themselves into believing that there's any cogent argument that the strip search was reasonable. The school district coughed up this horse manure:

Lawyers for the school district said in a brief that it was “on the front lines of a decades-long struggle against drug abuse among students.” Abuse of prescription and over-the-counter medications is on the rise among 12- and 13-year-olds, the brief said, citing data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Among them, how many cases involve abuse of ibuprofen? That would be zero, you say?

They seem to know that's pretty thin, so they're also offering this claim...

In a sworn statement submitted in the case, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, No. 08-479, Mr. Wilson said he had good reason to suspect Ms. Redding. She and other students had been unusually rowdy at a school dance a couple of months before, and members of the school staff thought they had smelled alcohol. A student also accused Ms. Redding of having served alcohol at a party before the dance, Mr. Wilson said.

The relevance of that would be... what? School officials thought, in retrospect, that the kids might have been all hopped up on ibuprofen? That the girl may have been hiding cans of beer inside her ibuprofen tablets?

The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant.

Rumors that don't justify any disciplinary action? Now those are relevant. Leave the danged facts out of this, thank you.

“Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules,” the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, “only that she was never caught.”

Exactly. Now let's have the school employees involved subjected to strip searches, applying that same reasoning.

"Zero Tolerance" in Schools

So, do we laugh or cry?