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Zero tolerance strikes again
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Zachary Christie with his mother, Debbie, his father, Curtis, and the Cub Scout utensil that got him suspended from school. (Mustafah Abdulaziz, NY Times)
At the Christina School District in Newark, DE, Zachary Christie is in trouble for bringing a weapon to school and the school district has a strict, zero tolerance policy.
What did he bring to school? A spork. It's a camping tool that serves as a knife, a spoon and a fork, and Zach brought it to school to use at lunch.
Zachary is six. He's in first grade. He had just become a Cub Scout and he was so excited about it he wanted to bring his camping utensil to school.
For that, the school suspended him and ordered him to attend the district's reform school for 45 days.
This is such an irritating story.
It's been a long time since most of us were six, let alone a member of the an organization like the Cub Scouts (or the Boy Scouts). But like many 6-year-olds, you were excited to belong to an organization. You were excited to go to meetings (before you would learn that meetings were a pain in the neck). The meetings were fun. You got together with classmates or new friends to do things, make things, go on field trips, start engaging in the big wide world of which you were apart and about which you knew very little.
It was fun.
Of course, those were the days when we allowed our children to have childhoods. We don't much allow kids to have much of a childhood anymore.
We're so terrified about the things that confront them in our society that we practically keep them in hermetically sealed enclosures for fear that something horrible will befall them.
There are horrible things out there but I've often wondered if the real monster isn't us --paranoid parents overreacting to overhyped stories like a kidnapping here, a murder there. I've often wondered if we seriously took a look at the number of the types of horrible things that happen as against the population. I'm not sure that they happen as larger percentage today than they ever happened before. We cover them more closely, and almost incessantly to a point which may lead us to think things are worse than ever, to the point where we don't even let our children go out in the front yard without taking dozens of precautions.
I don't about the horrible things but I'm pretty certain that if there's a difference between today and yesterday, it's that we don't allow our kids the opportunity to develop that sense of self. It's important to let kids develop a sense of self, and you do get to do that when you belong to organizations like the Cub Scouts.
So here's this boy in Newark, DE, who, exuberantly at the age of six, without realizing what a horrible transgression he was about to commit, took his spork to school to use in the cafeteria. He was proud of it, proud of being a Cub Scout, proud of this rite of passage that the spork represented to him.
The school system took a rather dim view of that idea:
Spurred in part by the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, many school districts around the country adopted zero-tolerance policies on the possession of weapons on school grounds. More recently, there has been growing debate over whether the policies have gone too far.But, based on the code of conduct for the Christina School District, where Zachary is a first grader, school officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, "regardless of possessor's intent," knives are banned.But the question on the minds of residents here is: Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?
School officials, of course, make the classic school official argument:
We feel so bad about Zachary and his family but we had no choice because the school system has a zero tolerance policy and so it's not even up to us. This device could act as a knife. A knife can be a weapon, ergo, we have no choice but to impose a suspension on Zachary because the possessor's intent has nothing do with guilt.
It's irritating enough that dunderheads in our school systems have dodged their responsibility to exercise common sense and be willing to stand by their decisions with zero tolerance --because they can never go wrong with zero tolerance. They can make the same argument they made to Zachary's parents to any other parents anywhere a school system has a zero tolerance policy. In fact, this isn't a first at this school:
…Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district's reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap. School officials declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.Ms. Herbert, who said her son was a straight-A student, has since been home-schooling him instead of sending him to the reform school.The Christina school district attracted similar controversy in 2007 when it expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project.
Here's the problem: Zero tolerance is a cheap way to relieve us of thinking for ourselves. We've got a rule, so no more thinking necessary. Think about that for a moment. Thinking means you are using your powers of discretion to reach some sort of judgment. Using discretion requires ascertaining facts, applying logic and then drawing sensible conclusions. Zero tolerance precludes any of that. Just unthinkingly do as you're told. Of all places for such a thing to occur, a school --the institution that supposed to offer learning, teach problem solving and encourage lateral thinking in an attempt to equip students with the tools to last a lifetime.
More than that, we send kids to school in the hope they'll learn a sense of personal responsibility and here we are dealing with school administrators who refuse to accept any sense of personal responsibility in making these decisions.
We're sorry, Zachary's parents, but we can't think for ourselves.
We cannot use common sense, Zachary's parents.
We have to impose this punishment, which, Zachary's parents, in this case, is draconian because clearly, there was no crime.
Zachary did not bring a weapon to school. Zachary brought a camping device to school.
But here's what's really irritating about this story. This is not Zachary's problem, is it? It's our problem. We're the ones with the problem. We're the ones who aren't willing to differentiate between a spork that any newly-minted 6-year-old Cub Scout would be proud to take to school, and an uzi, which, last I checked, does represent a threat and certainly isn't a camping instrument a newly-minted Cub Scout would take to school.
We're the ones who don't have the guts to accept the responsibility of making tough decisions and standing by them, even when it generates some heat. Whatever happened to the kind of school principals and school superintendents of yore --men and women who understood right from wrong, who knew what common sense was all about, who understood that occasionally you had to make parents unhappy because you're going to make a decision they're not going to like, but it was a decision in the best interests of their child, of them and of the school system. You made it, and you stood by it, and went on with your day, and your career.
Whatever happened to those people? Whatever happened to people willing to make quality decisions?
They're gone. They've been replaced by automatons such as those of the Newark, DE, school district.
Zachary's parents are getting the best revenge: They're home-schooling him for the 45 day suspension, so what happens is that he doesn't lose credit for the schooling but the school loses credit for his attendance. Schools receive funding based on attendance but in this instance, Zachary doesn't lose credit for the schooling but the school loses credit for the money.
It does raise the question of money, though. Does such a policy add to the cost of a public education? How many times have we asked, given the amount of money we spend on education, why we don't get a better result? How many times has someone asked, "Why do we have so many administrators? Shouldn't those people be teaching? Isn't that where our money ought to be spent?"
Well, no doubt, if you have a litigious situation where you have to hide behind zero tolerance policies, you must need a lot of administrators to police the halls and watching out for deadly 6-year-old Cub Scouts. It takes a lot of people to catch deadly 6-year-old Cub Scouts, especially if they're brandishing a weapon like a spork! Why, you can't just have one administrator take that problem on; you need several.
And we wonder where the money goes?
Unfortunately, not every family can do what Zachary's parents did and home-school their child, nor is it a convenient solution for every family to put a child in a private school, or even another public school. So we're stuck.
It just kills me to hear stories like this because common sense is trampled and what tramples common sense is not the excesses of the parents or the people in the community, but the unwillingness of these administrators to take a stand on something they know is right. They'd rather hide behind zero tolerance.
If Zachary isn't exonerated for this infraction, which is by the way, developmentally appropriate expression of his pride of being a Cub Scout-- then I can only think that the school administrators involved, who surely consider themselves intelligent and committed public servants, capitulated to a fear of reprisal by an authority greater than their own. In other words, policy trumped logic and reason in this instance, and the victim is the child.
Are these the people we want educating our children?
Are these the people we want educating our children?
I'm sure Zachary will get over it but it really is disgusting when Zachary has to pay the price of our ineptitude, because that's what's really happening here. And if you ask me, making children pay for our ineptitude is one of those horrible things that happen to kids today and we don't even realize we're the ones doing it to them. It's certainly not the kind of horrible thing we did to kids years ago.
FYI: Zach's parents have started a website, helpzachary.com, to drum up support for her son.
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