Boy's camping utensil = weapon
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| Mon, 10-12-2009 - 12:25pm |
I think this school really went over the top on this one... "School officials concluded he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary faces 45 days in the district's reform school." Say WHAT??!!! Good grief!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/12/MNM21A4B2T.DTL
"Boy's camping utensil violates 'zero tolerance'
Ian Urbina, New York Times
Monday, October 12, 2009
(10-12) 04:00 PDT Newark, Del. -- Zachary Christie, 6, was so excited about joining the Cub Scouts that he brought a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school to use at lunch.
School officials concluded he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary faces 45 days in the district's reform school.
Spurred in part by the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, many school districts around the country adopted zero-tolerance policies on 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.
Critics contend that zero-tolerance policies like those in the district have led to sharp increases in suspensions and expulsions, often putting children on the streets or in other places where their behavior only worsens, and that the policies undermine the use of common sense by school officials in handling minor infractions.
For Delaware, Zachary's case is especially frustrating because last year state lawmakers tried to make disciplinary rules more flexible by giving local boards authority to, "on a case-by-case basis, modify the terms of the expulsion."
The law was introduced after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because her grandmother sent a birthday cake to school, and a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal - but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.
Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.
Other school districts are also trying to address problems they say have stemmed in part from overly strict zero-tolerance policies.
In Baltimore, around 10,000 students, roughly 12 percent of enrollment, were suspended during the 2006-07 school year, mostly for disruption and insubordination, according to a report by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. School officials there are re-writing the disciplinary code, to route students to counseling rather than suspension.
In Milwaukee, where school officials reported that 40 percent of ninth-graders had been suspended in the 2006-07 school year, the superintendent has encouraged teachers not to overreact to student misconduct."
Blessings,
Gypsy
)O(

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You're a Republican because you believe it's better that school administrators blindly adhere to a blanket rule than consider the full context of a given offense and judge accordingly?
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Could it have been because someone on the school board recognized what idiots blind adherence to Z-T was demonstrating them to be?
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**You feel the same way about our legal system?
Like Rush, and like you've noted, I agree that
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"After one child said he went to Disneyland, the entire rest of the group claimed they had gone to Disneyland over the weekend."
LOL One-upmanship.
"They know or should know
"Make a full body search"
Well, yeah. My DD wasn't much of a problem. My two son, I had to search them every morning. Go through their bags before school. They liked to take their toys to school with them. Every child is different.
As the parent of a 5 year old boy, I have to wonder why the mother or father didn't simply tell the boy it was against the rules to carry a knife to school even though they knew he wouldn't use it unwisely. If another child had taken it from him and stabbed him with it, then what? There are very young kids attacking each other in schools now. And I always hear someone say "Where were the parents? Why didn't they stop their child from getting their hands on that weapon?" I don't feel the little boy was mature enough to decide whether or not to take the knife to school. He was excited. He wanted to show it off. But the parents could have avoided all this by simply saying no to him. I check my little boy's backpack. He loves to try and sneak toys into class. And I explain it is against the rules. He isn't traumatized by it. He says ok. And no harm is done. And he understands that society has rules. Whether we agree with them all or not.
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