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”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.