[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Zero tolerance = Zero IQ

[fnord]

bump for 'This is True'. With the deluge of weekly newsletters available, Cassingham's has stood the test of time. It is witty and deadly accurate. He really rails against the stupidity of modern life, especially ZT, dumb criminals, and silly lawsuits.

I have been a subscriber for probably 8 years, and a premium (few dollars a year) for the last several. I highly recommend FReepers check it out, at least the free version.

[Mamzelle]

"Zero Tolerance" is lazy management. Just issue a ridiculously extreme edict, and prove your toughness by bizarre enforcement.

Case in point...sending daughter to school, who had a very mild tummyache, with a pink Pepto-Bismol tablet. Then realizing, with horror, that this might result in her expulsion from school.

[irv]

Zero tolerance policies are rarely enacted by law. That's the scary thing: When administrators do have a choice, and choose to avoid any semblance of thought and hyper-react to minor things.

It's common in schools. Far less common even in politically correct workplaces like mine. I guess it's because there's work that needs to be done in the real world, while the schools feel no need to produce.

But that's another rant.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Waterguns are gateway toys. Nailclippers are gateway guillotines.

[dark_lord]

It is easy to get riled up. But note the stories cover the whole planet and go back to 1997. It does happen, and where it happens it is nasty bureaucraps taking advantage just to be mean. But any given kid is more likely to be hit by lighting than hammered by a zero tolerance ruling.

That said, the real problem is the "atmosphere" of fear and oppression this communicates. It teachs some kids to be weasals who can turn in other kids, and it teaches other kids that it is okay to break the rules (because the rules are, after all, so obviously stupid) - and of course, that adults are not to be trusted since it is the adults that passed and enforce the stupid rules.

[Gritty]

Here's the offending deadly weapon...

[FITZ]

We have zero-tolerance in the public schools my kids attend and if it weren't for that, I'd have to home-school them. There are gang fights every day in the middle school ---it's one thing if the kids fight with their fists but if they start bringing knives to fight with it's going to get bloody. Many kids are caught using drugs and out they go ---the nice thing is by 9th grade the kids who aren't going to learn anything are gone and the fights dwindle down.

[FITZ]

The schools my kids go keep zero tolerance just to illegal drugs, knives and guns. Another school I know of takes things quite a bit further, a boy got suspended for giving a girl a "wedgie" in the 6th grade ---her mother thought it was sexual abuse.

[henderson field]

Zero tolerance is a Nazi Policy. Do we want to be Nazis? Perhaps we should not tolerate Zero Tolerance.

[JoeSixPack1]

Zero Tolerance = Zero liability on said teacher, administrator of faculty member.

It's all a simple matter of educators and faculty not having to take responsibility for any action they may be required to make or feel is necessary to the circumstance. The more outragous the circumstances, the more press coverage for the policy.

So once again teacher unions' insulate educators from parents' outrage, disguised as "for the children".

[CGTRWK]

My theory is that the zero tolerance nonsense is largely an attempt by schools to protect themselves from the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons.

If you leave any room in the rules for the administrators' discretion, obviously when a known good kid brings is giving a friend what looks like an aspirin or brings in a pocketknife or whatever it is, you don't punish them. But when a known troublemaker does the same thing, he's up to no good and you crack down on it.

The problem is that a disproportionate number of known troublemakers are members of oppressed minorities. If you can expel a poor black kid for bringing a knife to school (to threaten other kids) and don't expel a middle class white kid for bringing a knife (to cut up her lunch), Jesse Jackson will be in town stirring up a race riot faster than you can say poke chops.

As a result, the only way a school can go after the dangerous kids is with inflexible rules which are purposefully blind to intentions and everything else which seperates good kids from bad. When the rabble rousers come out, the school can point at a clearly written rule and there is no oppurtunity to attack an administrator's judgement.

Needless to say, this is an absolutely insane way of doing things, but what more can you expect from liberals? To go off on a bit of a tangent, if you could expect anyone to crack and shoot up their school, it'd be the good kids who do everything right for 10 years and then get railroaded by this kind of thing. I'm surprised that hasn't happened yet.

[Fred Hayek]

It's gone beyond the schoolyard, it's in the workplace. A few years ago there was an incident at one of the Intel plants. Two electricians - one man, one woman, were working on one of the junction boxes during a FAB conversion. The man says to the woman "nice T-shirt". A third party - a woman - was walking by, and filed a complaint. The man had commited an act of sexual harrassment in the workplace against the woman that he had made the comment. He was promptly fired.

The whole story - the T-shirt said "Texas A&M", where one of his children were going to college. The woman to whom this comment was directed to knew that, and did not take offense at the comment.

[JudgemAll]

Zero Tolerance is like saying you can kill someone because they threaten you with a paper gun. You simply cannot confine someone under color of law because they are playing hypothetical in accademic or extracurricular ways.

Zero Tolerance is the thing of fascists and mafias.

[Mulder]

I hope I'm around to see the Day when there is "zero tolerance" for the facists who enact these policies.