Longtime readers of this column know that I have zero tolerance for schools that practice zero tolerance with their students, especially when a reaction to an incident reaches the level of blithering idiocy.
I direct you to a recent report on CNN concerning 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez, who attends a junior high school in Forest Hills, N.Y.
School officials say Alexa used a green marker to write on her school desk, "I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10," followed by a smiley face.
The appropriate, common-sense reaction would have been to punish the girl by making her clean the markings from the desk or have them removed professionally and bill her parents for the cost.
The zero-tolerance reaction chosen by the school was to have police escort the crying child from the building in handcuffs in front of her classmates.
Police? Handcuffs? This is a 12-year-old girl, not the Unabomber.
When will educated school administrators stop holding children to higher standards than we hold adults? Years ago, when I worked in printing, one of my co-workers sometimes used a razor blade to carve words into her proofreading board. She was never reprimanded, let alone escorted from the building under guard as if she were Lee Harvey Oswald.
In another case, CNN reported, 25 middle school students were arrested in November after a food fight at a Chicago school.
In my day, we would have been marched to the principal's office and forced to serve after-school detention after we cleaned up the cafeteria.
These days, perhaps because principals are too busy making up inane rules such as zero tolerance, the kids are handcuffed, fingerprinted and hauled off to the slammer.
I wonder if they make orange jumpsuits in pee-wee sizes.
In part, I believe zero tolerance is an overreaction to the fact that schools no longer have the freedom they once did to punish a child to maintain discipline. Parents don't want schools to discipline their young, saying, "I'll handle my own kid."
But they don't. And kids know it, so they have no fear, either at home or at school.
During my childhood, kids feared teachers. I don't mean we quaked in our boots, but we knew they had the authority to punish us for infractions. Punishment ranged from notes home to our parents to sitting in the hall to the humiliation of being paddled in front of our peers.
I am not promoting paddling in the schools (all you liberals can sigh with relief — I have not gone over to the Dark Side), but no kid I know who ever got paddled died from it. And a kid who got spanked thought twice before he broke the rules again. (No, I was never paddled, although once in fourth grade I had to sit in the hall for telling a crude joke that included a word that rhymed with "bass." A classmate ratted me out after he carelessly repeated my joke within earshot of our teacher, Mrs. Hinkle.)
Can in-school punishment turn abusive? Of course it can, and therein lies the danger. But in my opinion, being led out of school in handcuffs for drawing on a desk is just as abusive, and leaves deeper scars, than any paddle ever did.
I'll support zero tolerance for kids only when we enforce it for everybody. If you fine students for being tardy, as was done to some children in Los Angeles, then grown-ups should be fined for being late to work and legislators should be fined when they show up late for votes, or don't show up at all.
Zero tolerance for kids?
Come on. Even criminals get three strikes.