No Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

I have a very important question to ask you all, so I hope you will all pay attention, because this could one day save your life. The question is this: which is more dangerous, two guns and 16 bombs or a breaded chicken finger?

Stop laughing, this is serious. Apparently one particular principal in Arkansas thought the chicken was as or more dangerous than the guns and bombs, because he suspended an 8-year old boy for pointing the chicken finger at a teacher and saying, "Pow pow pow." Unfortunately, stories like these are growing more and more commonplace because of people like this particular administrator who have responded to fear of school violence by instituting "zero tolerance" policies in their schools.

You've heard of these policies, these are the types of rules that cause kids to get suspended for bringing aspirin to school for their headaches, because they are seen as equivalent to bringing heroin or crack into school. These are the policies that get little boys thrown out of school for kissing the little girl on the playground, because that is equivalent to "sexual assault". And don't even think about what happens when little boys decided to go play "Cops and Robbers" on the playground, pointing fingers at each other and yelling "bang, you're dead." What this all amounts to really, is outright stupidity.

What do these people really hope to accomplish with these zero tolerance policies? The decision to choose what is and isn't a weapon is very subjective. Let's face it, if you don't want kids to come into school with weapons, then they can't have pens and pencils. Well, hell, they could stab each other with them! And what about the little overweight kid who has a specific diet the doctor has placed him on in an effort to keep his weight down. You know what, that sounds like a prescription to me, guess he can't bring food into school, because that's equivalent to bringing drugs! And since cases of sexual harassment have been filed in the workplace because men have looked at women the wrong way, let's teach our children right. From now on, nobody's allowed to look at anyone, including the teacher, because you don't want to start some sort of illicit teacher-student relationship, after all.

Now do you see how stupid this is? Of course I'm giving out ridiculous and theoretically unlikely situations, but they could all technically be grounds for suspension under zero tolerance policies, and whoever thought a kid would be suspended for pointing a chicken finger at a teacher? The most ridiculous thing of all of this is the principal's quote: "People saw real threats to the safety and security of their students." What do you mean, were you afraid the kid was going to throw the thing at the teacher and leave a stain on his/her clothing? OH THE AGONY!!!

Now I realize the spirit in which these things were enacted. People wanted to find a way to curb the behavior that leads to the number of school shootings that have happened in the last few years. Obviously this was the case in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the site of the "chicken finger incident", which was devastated by a school shooting a couple years back. However, there is a line between stopping certain behaviors and stopping ALL behaviors, and while we may have not quite found that line yet, this is so far over the line, it's not even close. It's in a different zip code from the line. And ultimately, even this madness may not stop a violent incident from happening. Consider Elmira's Southside High School, where last month a kid passed a note to a classmate warning of an impending Columbine-style attack he planned to carry out with two big guns and a collection of homemade explosives. Luckily, the classmate did the right thing and alerted the proper people, so tragedy was averted. How did the kid get his arsenal into school, you ask? In an oversized gym bag, that's how.

Which brings me to another solution that's been put into place in an attempt to stop incidents like Columbine. Many schools have banned backpacks and gym bags from their premise, which is similarly stupid. This now means that kids have to lug all the things they need for school or to take home for homework in, well, their arms, because anything else might be used to bring a gun to school, administrators believe. I like the idea of the see-through backpacks, and that would definitely be a much better way to go about it. Don't make things that much harder on the students in an effort to claim you've made your school safer. I do realize that if a rule like this was in place in Elmira, the kid in question could not have brought the guns and bombs to school, but the kids at Columbine, you'll recall, didn't bring their stuff into school in bags. They just walked in with their oversized trenchcoats and fired away.

I do have a solution, and it's probably not the perfect solution, but maybe the only necessary one in the case of preventing weapons (I mean real weapons, not those of the edible variety) from entering schools. The solution is metal detectors. Yes, it will slow down the process of entering school everyday, but it's a small hassle, as compared to the constant hassle of zero tolerance policies. Run it like when you enter a government building, and when you think about it, public schools are kinda like government buildings, funded by the taxpayers and all. Have a cop there, ask the kids to take their valuables out of their pockets and walk through the metal detector. People worry that it will give the school a "prison" feel to it. Please. As long as there have been schools, kids have felt like they're in a prison. If you put in a metal detector, you can actually let graduates into the school again so they can look around and see their old teachers. Other than for basketball games, I have not been in my old high school since the year after I graduated, because I haven't been allowed to.

I swear, if you let me in, I won't bring chicken.