So first graders are suspended for bringing an aspirin to school. Middle school children get strip searched. A child is suspended for defending himself when physically attacked by a bully. All in the name of zero tolerance.
Schools, like courts, need to be flexible and reasonable. Zero tolerance is an easy sound bite, but it means that the school will not consider anything but punishment, even for an innocent mistake.
Currently, a San Francisco Bay Area school is being sued by a parent because his son was thrown out of an honors program for copying homework. The school is suspiciously silent about the nature of the homework. If the child copied the definitions of words instead of looking them up in a dictionary, the punishment is too much. If the child copied an essay from the internet, the punishment is reasonable.
School is a perfect opportunity to teach about justice. By following a nice sounding policy which results in injustice, the schools are teaching that school childen should not expect justice.
Zero tolerance allows the school administration to feel good about being unreasonable and inflexible.
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