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 ...
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.
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