RULE 30

Zero tolerance=zero common sense.

Zero-tolerance policies are the polar opposite of developing a moral compass, because they don’t require any thought at all. They are especially popular among the slow, the lazy, and the bureaucratic. Try using your brain instead.

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The roll call of inanities grows every year:

The kindergartner who was suspended for bringing in a dinosaur-shaped plastic squirt gun, in violation of a zero-tolerance weapons ban.115 A boy suspended from elementary school for using his finger as a pretend gun and saying, “Bang”;116 an eleven-year-old girl suspended for doodling stick-figures of her teachers with arrows through their heads.117

At one bastion of zero-tolerance senselessness, an eight-year-old third-grader was suspended for seven days after his mother packed a butter knife in his lunch along with some peanut butter and jelly;118 at another school an honor student was expelled for carrying a Swiss army knife; and in Texas, a high school baseball player was busted for having an eight-inch-long souvenir baseball bat on the front seat of his car—school officials decided it met the written definition of a weapon. These officials ignored the real aluminum bats that he was carrying in his trunk.119

“Nature,” as H. L. Mencken so insightfully put it, “abhors a moron.”120 The same obviously cannot be said of school boards who often hire them as principals.

In Indiana, an eighth-grader who realized that he had inadvertently brought a Swiss army knife to school in his jacket pocket turned it in to the office as soon as he arrived at school, but was suspended for ten days anyway. The principal recommended that he be expelled, even though the student had told the truth and done the right thing.121 Assuming that the point of the no-weapons rule was to keep knives out of school, it had succeeded when the boy turned it in. The message his suspension sent to other students was probably to keep any weapons hidden and as far away from administrators as possible.

In Georgia, a sixth-grader named Ashley Smith was suspended from school for two weeks when administrators decided that her Tweety Bird key chain violated the district’s zero-tolerance weapons policy.122

A fan of Tweety Bird who runs her own Tweety Bird Web site, Ashley insisted that the tiny chain couldn’t hurt anyone. But school administrators told reporters: “A chain like the one in question can have any number of devices attached to it and it becomes a very dangerous weapon.” Virtually a weapon of mass destruction.

This sort of dunderheadedness extends to the enforcement of drug policies. Some pencil-necked administrative idiots believe that medications like Midol and Advil should be treated with the same urgency and seriousness as heroin. Rules, after all, are rules, and administrators can’t be expected to make distinctions between a hallucinogen and a pain-reliever. So fifteen middle-school students were suspended and required to attend “drug awareness classes and counseling” for passing around and tasting an Alka-Seltzer tablet. In West Virginia a student who brought a cough drop to school was deemed to be in violation of her school’s drug policy.123

In Louisiana, the Bossier Parish School Board voted to expel high school student Amanda Stiles for a year for possessing a single tablet of Advil. The over-the-counter pain-reliever was found during a search of Amanda’s purse after a teacher received a tip that Amanda had been smoking in school. No cigarettes or lighter was found, but the search nailed the Advil. The superintendent said the suspension was “consistent with the board’s zero-tolerance policy.”124

None of this, of course, is really about keeping children safe or even teaching them how to behave. It is about administrators protecting their backsides.

Instead of encouraging children to exercise sound judgment, zero tolerance shows adults at their most arbitrary and stupid, especially when it punishes students for doing the right thing. Consider this classic report from the BBC:

A 12-year-old American girl has been branded a drug dealer after going to the aid of a schoolmate who was suffering an asthma attack.

Christine Rhodes shared her inhaler with thirteen-year-old Brandy Dyer after spotting her having breathing problems.

She has since been suspended from activities at Mount Airy Middle School in Maryland—and labeled a drug trafficker on her school record.

Christine insists that she was only trying to help her friend.

“The principle of my school told me that what I did was against school rules, giving drugs to another person.” she said.

“I was really sad and I was crying because I thought she was trying to say that I shouldn’t have helped her and let her stay there and almost die.”

Brandy believes she would not have survived the asthma attack if Christine had not come to her rescue.

She said: “If Christine had not given me that inhaler they told me at the hospital that I would have died.

“She saved my life and it is unfair that they are giving her these charges.”

As a result of Mount Airy’s decision, Christine is banned from taking part in school activities for three years.…”125

A younger cousin of the zero-tolerance regimes is the push to ban sodas and snack foods from schools as a means of fighting childhood obesity. The assumption behind the soda ban apparently is that if Mountain Dew is unavailable at school, the little Fat Alberts won’t be able to find it anywhere else. And, as one worrier earnestly explained to me, we simply can’t take the risk of teaching children to exercise good judgment.

That makes perfect sense: how can adults expect kids to use common sense when they are afraid to use it themselves? Don’t make those adults your role models.