Here’s the latest report (unfortunately, it’s another one from Virginia) on just how stupid zero-tolerance policies have become. It’s difficult to understand how school administrators let a rigidly fixed set of rules overtake the application of common sense. Yet, it happens again and again.
No, this is not an April Fool’s Day joke. A six-year-old boy in Virginia has been suspended from school for … crying.
Earlier this month, Gary and Heather Clark were notified by officials at Tallwood Elementary School in Virginia Beach that their son Bronson had been suspended from school for allegedly crying in class and disrupting the educational process, according to the Rutherford Institute, a Virginia-based civil liberties organization.
The parents then contacted the Rutherford Institute, which is calling on the school to rescind the suspension.
“There is a suspension for disruptive behaviour on his school record now. And that follows you. And it’s cumulative, meaning that if
something else happens, he’s now considered a kid who creates problems,” said John Whitehead, president of the institute. Officials at the school did not immediately respond to requests for an interview.
In a letter sent on Wednesday to the co-ordinator of student services at the Virginia Beach City Public Schools, Mr. Whitehead, a constitutional attorney, calls the young boy’s suspension perhaps “the most shocking example yet of the extent to which school officials are failing in their duties to create healthy and supportive educational environments for their young charges. “While crying in class may indeed be inconvenient for the teacher, surely there are other, less draconian means of addressing this type of disruption than an out-of-school suspension.”
The zero-tolerance policies adopted by many schools have seen kids “tossed out for the craziest things,” Mr. Whitehead said in a telephone interview. He cited a greatest hits of seemingly head-scratching insanity: A case where a Grade 4 student who gargled Scope mouthwash after lunch was suspended because it violated the school’s drugs and alcohol policy; a high-school student suspended because the nail clippers he had at school were considered a weapon; even one instance of a youngster bringing a drawing of an uncle, who was then serving in Iraq, carrying his gun, which the school said violated its weapons policy.
I was telling my son about it, and he said “I wish there was something people could do about it, other than hold the perpetrators up to public ridicule.” There may not be anything that I can do – not directly, anyway. So it’s option B – expose them to as much ridicule as possible.
See the whole thing at The Globe and Mail
