Posted on 10/12/2009 5:54:24 AM PDT by reaganaut1
NEWARK, Del. — Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.
Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.
“It just seems unfair,” Zachary said, pausing as he practiced writing lower-case letters with his mother, who is home-schooling him while the family tries to overturn his punishment.
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.
...
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.
“The result of those studies is that more school districts have removed discretion in applying the disciplinary policies to avoid criticism of being biased,” said Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University who has written about school violence. He added that there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The bright side is that Zachary will benefit from 45 days of homeschooling.
It’s the end of the world, as we know it......
This is what you get when you let morons run your schools for the benefit of the NEA.
Good thing he didn’t have a No. 2 pencil. Those are deadly in the right hands. :)
We have lost of friggen minds and sense of ourselves. The USA a great country that once was...
Zero-tolerance = Zero thought = Zero’s Administration..............
Good grief, if you can use it in Scouts you should be allowed to have it at a school too.
The really dumb-funny thing about all these stories is that the stupid zero-tolerance liberals involved have such a narrow paradigm about what a weapon is that they totally disregard thousands of items around them that could easily be used to maim or kill...
“Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.” —George Washington
My take on this is that the school said that more blacks were disciplined for bringing weapons to school. I think this punishment is designed to show the world that the school isn’t biased, so they discipline a white student for fear of a demonstration by ACORN.
I can't believe this is literally the whole story. Sounds more to me like the black kids (because of upbringing issues) were more likely to be threatening violence with said items. Everything seemed fair until the likes of Al Sharpton jumped in.
Next banned weapons: Scissors, rocks, and even sharped edge papers.
And these morons get paid taxpayer money to do these brilliant things.
No thought required. No brain required. You have to wonder what actual purpose they serve short of being a taxpayer funded jobs program.
How do people eat at this school? Do they eat soup with their hands?
“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.”
Which is what those two campuses had, and the CAUSE of so many deaths!
the Joker?
Government schools are evil.
When sporks are outlawed,
only outlaws will have sporks.
You could probably blame lawyers and our litigious society,
but you can also call all the school administrators
COWARDS
for not having the guts to say that a cubscout from a responsible family with a camping knife/utensil
is DIFFERENT
from the kid of a crackho with no father bringing a knife to school to “cut some cracka”.
Plastic utensils like they might have in airport security areas?
There needs to be a separation of school and state.
Runcible spoons.
Homeschool.
It all makes sense if you’ve watched MSNBC’s “Lockdown” program. Prisoners in the joint can make lethal weapons from all sorts of tools and utensils.
I guess if you see the schools as training grounds for the penitentiary- little Zachary is just getting early education.
Heck, we turned our Popsicle sticks into “knives” by sharpening them on concrete, when I was young. We, however, wouldn't think to actually hurt anyone with them!
How do you push your peas up onto your fork with your knife like you’re not supposed to if you’re using that thing?
The principle who suspended this kid is the fat little toad third from the left. She apparently has no problem finding her own fork.
>> This is what you get when you let morons run your schools for the benefit of the NEA.
Tell you what... particularly in big urban areas there is an army of doped-up bimbo soccer mommies that are 100% behind the NEA in this nonsense.
Eventually, the homeschool movement is going to get so big that those with Michelle's point of view
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
They will eventually determine that homeschoolers are DANGEROUS because they are "creating a parallel society" (German courts have already ruled this way).
They will make it more and more difficult, with the goal of legally eliminating it. I (and they) know that if they do it all at once, it's one of those lines in the sand where the shooting starts.
Of course he has no actual incidents like this to reference.
We will never regain the country until we eliminate the labor unions from the school system, wrest control from pussified, leftist, one-world "Educators" and return our schools to control of dedicated, well balanced, teachers whose only agenda is to teach children instead of indoctrinating them with leftist dogma.
If we take slop, run it through a blender, and serve it to the kids in a paper cup (without a straw - which could be used to poke someone’s eye out) perhaps that would pass the zero tolerance test.
The designer won the Nobel Peas Prize!
Simple solution... just label the kid as being “at risk” and then he can pretty much do whatever he wants.
I’m glad to see that Dolores Umbridge is still able to find work...
There used to be fights, dare I say “back in the 50’s”, where two boys would fight, wrestle, and tussel about,
and NO ONE DREAMED OF “PULLING A KNIFE”.
Because it was WRONG. The perp would be perpetually isolated from EVERYONE else for pulling such and egregious breach of decency.
But, we can’t have “shame” these days, you know, too “damaging to the psyche” etc, and of course, standards of right and wrong are just too “ethnocentric” and judgemental.
That way they don't get in to trouble for cases like this and if something bad happens “Well it wasn't in the policy”
Bunch of weasels! (Sorry no insult to weasels intended.
That’s the deal, though,
since he is in a stable family with caring parents,
it’s “not fair”, and he has to be brought down a notch to the same level as the “at risk” kids.
How can it be a parallel society when the home schooled are better educated?
6 years old. 45 day suspension. For a Cub Scout utensil.
Ping.
We’re parallel, just further up the X-axis :D
I’m surprised they allow kids to drive to high school anymore.
I can’t think of any more deadly weapon that can be used for mass destruction and death than a kid deciding to point his car at a group of jocks that just stuffed his head in a toilet and press down on the gas pedal. One turn of the wheel and pressing down on the gas changes a car from a tool to a weapon, just like a gun it’s all about intent.
I really shouldn’t post this because some idiot administrator will think about it some and decide that I’m right.
Intent has to be factored in to some of these incidents like this, which it seems isn’t allowed anymore. They say that blacks are three times as likely to be punished than others for the same crime, are they comparing the kids who are a boyscout and have their jackknife in a coat pocket with the gang member who carries a switchblade? It all comes down to intent, and that’s where the race card always gets played every time.
A better educated group would, by definition, BE a “parallel society”.
What the German courts were upset about, though, was the “isolation”, ie, the non-exposure to worldly values, that the homeschoolers were experiencing.
That is EXACTLY WHY most homeschoolers do it.
James 4:4
You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
When I went to school no self respecting boy walked around without a penknife or, preferably a jack knife.
You never knew when you might have to open a can of pork and beans, build an emergency shelter, whittle a toy flute or fend off a mountain lion, a dragon or a band of godless commies.
Oh no! Where will he get his homosexual indoctrination for those 45 days?
Yeah, I CONSTANTLY carried a Swiss army knife (with scissors, etc).
Yesterday I installed a shop work light using nothing else. (I was pretty proud of myself :) )
That is most likely the cause of the “discrimination”. Those kids who were wielding weapons and threatening violence just happened to be black. So, in typical efficient gub’mint form, instead of trying to stop black kids from stabbing and shooting each other, they chose to pass zero-tolerance rules. Now no school administrator has to think at all. I wash my hands of this matter. Throw the child out. It’s the law.
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