I carry a little Swiss Army knife on my keychain -- I use it to open letters and packages and uncooperative shrink-wrapped consumer goods. The blade, just a tad over an inch long, has been dulled by these operations to the point where it takes some doing to cut things. The gooey residue from all the packing tape doesn't help either. So the chance that this knife is going to hurt anyone is essentially nil -- unless I accidentally stab myself someday while fighting with another shrink wrapper.
That said, before I can board an airplane, I have to remember to take the knife off the keychain. In the eyes of the Transportation Security Administration, even my dinky Swiss Army knife is a grave threat to America's security. If, being a forgetful person, I leave it in my carry-on bag one of these days, it will be confiscated at the security checkpoint. Annoying, to be sure. But I'd only be out a knife.
Students at U.S. elementary and high schools should be so lucky. Take, for example, this incident from Houston reported by Kris Axtman of the Christian Science Monitor: "Unaware it had turned cool overnight, Eddie Evans's 12-year-old son bolted out of the house in shirt sleeves. He was on his way to the bus stop when his mother called him back for a jacket.
"In third period the boy discovered that the three-inch pocketknife he had taken to his last Boy Scout meeting was still inside his coat -- a definite no-no under the school's zero-tolerance policy. Unsure what to do, he consulted a friend before putting the knife in his locker. The friend turned him in and, after lunch, police arrested him and took him to a juvenile-detention center without contacting his parents. [] Mr. Evans says the school then expelled his son for 45 days and enrolled him in an alternative school for juvenile offenders. By the end, the First Class Boy Scout, youth leader at church, and winner of an outstanding-student award was contemplating suicide."
This is just one of the countless travesties caused by school zero-tolerance policies since states rushed to enact them in the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. In Greeley, Colo., three boys were threatened with expulsion for playing with squirt guns. In Katy, Texas, a student was declared a "terrorist threat" and hauled off in handcuffs for writing a teacher's name on a list of "people who piss me off." I remember sitting in high school French class while it was explained to us that, under Michigan's new zero-tolerance law, saying "I'm going to kill you" would be grounds for an immediate suspension.
The problem we all noticed in that French class -- and the problem with so many of these policies -- is that, in the rush to have the zeroest tolerance imaginable, they don't take intent into account. It doesn't matter whether "I'm going to kill you" is a threat or a joke. It doesn't matter whether a pocket knife comes to school on purpose or as an accident. It doesn't matter that pointing a chicken finger at another student and saying "Bang!" is just play for elementary school students. (A Canadian eight-year-old was suspended for doing just that, by the way.) Zero-tolerance policies leave no room for the case-by-case judgments or mitigating factors that any rational person ought to consider when throwing penalties like arrest or expulsion around.
Some states seem to have belatedly realized the insanity of their policies. Action is coming slowly, though. The Texas legislature is now considering a bill that would require schools to -- gasp! -- consider a student's intent before dishing out punishments and wrecking young lives. Sadly, to quote Bob Schwartz, director of Philadelphia's Juvenile Law Center, this common sense measure puts Texas "ahead of the curve" compared to most other states.
Worse still, the recent shooting at a Minnesota school comes at just the wrong time. If the story gets enough play in the media, it might pressure legislators to back away from zero-tolerance reform in the states where it is being considered. That would make the incident doubly tragic.
There's no problem with imposing stiff penalties on students who threaten the safety of others. Students who carry a gun to school or slug another student have earned the punishments that zero-tolerance policies bring down upon them. But boy scouts with pocket knives and children playing cops and robbers deserve better than being arbitrarily lumped into the same group. The fact that most zero-tolerance policies, as currently written, can't see a difference between the two just shows how short-sighted they are. Let's hope that state legislators, when reconsidering this issue, don't suffer from the same affliction.
