When U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige was still superintendent of schools in Houston, he was already an advocate of zero-tolerance policies in schools. In a 1999 interview with the MacNeil Lehrer organization, Paige said, “When a student brings a weapon to school, the student is out of there. We will expel the student. But we don’t expel them to the street. We expel them to alternative placement, an alternative school.”
Under zero tolerance, circumstances don’t much matter. A student carrying a Swiss Army knife who intends to use the screwdriver on his car will be treated exactly the same as the student who intends to use the knife as a weapon.
Paul Vallas, former CEO of the Chicago public schools, described a policy that went one step further. “Let me point out that our zero-tolerance policy is a 24-hour-a-day policy,” he said. “So, if you are arrested for a serious offense on Sunday, you will face expulsion on Monday.”
These get-tough policies are popular with parents, to a point. The no-nonsense approach seems to promise safer schools, ones where learning can actually take place. But some parents are rethinking the one- size-fits-all approach to discipline. And school boards are feeling the pressure to adjust.
In places like Durham, where 57 percent of males in the public schools are black, but 80 percent of suspended students are black males, school board candidates describe the application of school policy as “unacceptable.” According to the News & Observer of Raleigh, “More than 40 percent of the black males had been suspended in the first semester of last school year.” Candidates for school board in Durham are largely in agreement on this issue. Candidates Steve Schewel, Minnie Forte, Steven Matherly, and Doug Wright joined Mayor Bill Bell in questioning aspects of the Durham suspension policy. That policy produced a 52 percent jump in suspensions over previous school years.
Reaction or overreaction?
Recent events in Clay County with Principal Mickey Noe, and in Watauga with Principal Gary Childers reflect some of the hazards inherent in enforcing disciplinary policies. Noe is facing misdemeanor child-abuse charges connected with bruises to a 10-year-old boy that are alleged to be the result of a paddling the student received — with his mother’s permission — in school. Noe’s lawyer, Zeyland McKinney, said in a statement to the Asheville Citizen-Times that he was surprised at the charges. Ordinarily, North Carolina educators are not liable for criminal charges unless they “could have foreseen that the punishment would cause permanent injury, or was given out of malice.”
In Watauga, the school board intervened in a case that concerns high school students who violated the school’s dress code. Clothing with messages that are “offensive to religion or gender” are prohibited at Wautauga High. The students in question wore T-shirts with messages considered antigay during an unofficial Day of Silence at the school. The Day was designed to promote awareness of “problems faced by lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth in schools.” Some of the offending T-shirts cited Bible verses that take a stand against homosexuality, some had handwritten messages, according to reports. Most of the students involved in the protest changed their clothes when asked by school officials, but three who refused were given a one-day suspension.
The American Family Association Center for Law and Policy represented the suspended students, and the school board has altered its policy to make clear what is “plainly offensive” and “disruptive,” the Winston-Salem Journal reports. A threatened lawsuit has led to settlement negotiations instead, accompanied by an apology from the school board. Michael DePrimo, senior litigator for the center, said, “The Supreme Court made clear long ago that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door.” He said that the case is one of “overreaction to peaceful student speech on a controversial issue.”
Increasing formality
Behavior in the classroom, including “disruptive” attire such as logo and “message” T-shirts, clothing in colors that signify gang membership, or styles that obviously violate the dress code, all flout authority and invite a response. The dilemma for school officials concerns how much discretion is allowed in judging the severity of a violation, and under what circumstances the zero-tolerance response kicks in.
On both sides of the school discipline issue, aggrieved parties have raised the stakes. Issues that were settled in the past with a call home to the parents, or between teacher, principal, and student, are now finding their way into police stations, lawyers’ offices, and courtrooms as the first option of choice. There is also a question about whether families involved in a serious dispute with a school, often over an individual educational plan, or who have kids facing punishments such as long-term suspension, should be accompanied by a lawyer to meetings with school officials.
In the 1996 case of Nicholas Roberts, a former high school student in Buncombe County, school officials refused to allow a lawyer to accompany Roberts at his disciplinary hearing. Roberts was charged with sexual harassment. The hearing board refused Roberts’ request to have a lawyer present when they discussed the matter, and Roberts was suspended for the rest of the semester. The N.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Roberts’ Sixth Amendment right to due process was violated, a ruling that was left intact by the state Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, finally ending the process in December 2003.
The Roberts decision adds a buffer for families against arbitrary or unilateral decisions by a school. But it also makes disciplinary action more formal, and by implication, more adversarial. There is less room for parents to work with the school to correct a student’s behavior, especially under zero tolerance, and more effort directed at shielding kids from the most drastic consequences of their actions.
Edwin Darden, senior staff lawyer with the national School Boards Association in Alexandria, Va., told Education Week that students don’t need the same safeguards as a person facing criminal prosecution, and that ”[S]chool districts are by and large fair places.”
Schools on the defensive
Schools themselves may need to resort to legal counsel more frequently as zero-tolerance rules up the ante for violations of all kinds. Parents are challenging the school’s right to impose expulsions and suspensions in some cases, and they are putting pressure on local school boards from two directions.
School districts can run afoul of parents if they discipline too vigorously, especially if the punishments seem unfair. Most of Durham’s school board candidates met at a forum in June 2004 and agreed that the district’s suspension policy was “unacceptable,” according to reports in the N&O and Durham Herald-Sun. Suspensions are up 52 percent over last year in Durham, and some observers think the policy needs to be revamped. One revision would include early notifications so that parents understand the problem well before it reaches the need for suspension.
Inconsistent enforcement has led to a legal morass for schools, parents and students. If the school does too little, or doesn’t act quickly enough, serious problems can ensue.
One such case involves a 14-year-old student at Goldsboro’s Rosewood High School. Bob Meeker was a freshman on the school’s wrestling team in 2000, when he reported that his teammates began hazing him. The assaults involved beating and other hazing practices, and took place, according to Meeker, at least 25 times. According to reports in the New York Daily News, Meeker finally brought a multi-tool to school to defend himself. When he was caught with the implement, he was suspended from Rosewood and assigned to an alternative school for students with a history of criminal behavior.
The Meekers eventually filed a federal lawsuit for $40 million in compensatory and punitive damages, naming coach William Edmundson, the principal, the superintendent, and the school district as culpable in the events at Rosewood. None of the hazers was ever punished by the school, according to reports, and no criminal charges were filed against them. Instead, the family is treating the incidents as a violation of civil rights, and the case has not yet been resolved.
Another hazing incident, at an Avery County high school basketball camp, did lead to charges and guilty pleas from the hazers. North Carolina law mandates expulsion for hazing.
In North Carolina, school expulsions were up about 50 percent between 2002-03. And long-term suspensions — more than 10 days — make up an increasing percentage of children removed from school. According to the North Carolina Center for the Prevention of School Violence, middle school through high school sophomores were the most-often suspended individuals, and black males were the largest component of that group.
Dangerous schools
In situations that involve gang activity and violence on campus, parents are increasingly demanding safer schools. The No Child Left Behind law, and North Carolina’s own policy regarding “persistently dangerous schools,” require that parents be allowed to transfer their children to a nondangerous school if the one they currently attend receives the persistently dangerous label. Each state defines “persistently dangerous” for itself.
But some jurisdictions can run afoul of parents if they enforce too vigorously or the punishments seem unfair.
The North Carolina State Board of Education Policy Manual states that if conditions exist during two consecutive school years that “continually expose students to injury from violent criminal offenses and the school has five or more criminal offenses per thousand students in those years, it is persistently dangerous.
According to Education Week, a report compiled in September 2003 showed 44 states, including Washington, D.C., reporting no persistently dangerous schools. North Carolina was among them.
But statewide figures aren’t so rosy. The number of violent incidents per 1,000 students — the 17 offenses that require police intervention according to the Department of Public Instruction policy manual — had risen from 6.08 per thousand to 8.3 per thousand between 2001 and 2002.
After the Columbine, Colo. massacre, zero tolerance wasn’t a hard sell. But many parents, including those in North Carolina schools, are beginning to see the down side of a no-questions-asked policy. As Ashley High School senior Josh Jewell discovered when he drove onto campus with his mother’s car and a plastic pistol among the toys on back seat, “as with all things absolute, [zero tolerance] can be unforgiving of the unintended.” The Wilmington World- Now WECT report noted that Josh could have been expelled. Instead, he was suspended for the remainder of the semester, and attended an alternative school in the area. Around the United States, similar stories confirm that there are students being suspended or expelled for reasons that make no sense for safety.
The 17 items that North Carolina public schools consider violent crimes, subject to the most severe punishments, do not include dress-code violations or other infractions that have sometimes spurred student suspensions.
Public rethinking?
The Youth Violence Project, undertaken by the University of Virginia School of Education, gathered commentary on zero tolerance, and reported incidents in which students were suspended for: having a one-inch knife in a manicure kit, a toy gun in school, and for shooting a paper clip with a rubber band.
The American Bar Association Journal notes that zero tolerance was “intended to apply only to serious criminal behavior involving firearms or illegal drugs…” The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University stated that “[Z]ero tolerance has become a philosophy that has permeated our schools; it employs a brutally strict disciplinary model that embraces harsh punishment over education.” The report also raised concerns about the high number of minority students affected, a result that has been noted by other sources as well. A 2000 article in the American Bar Association Journal also criticized zero tolerance, as “making zero sense.”
Expulsion or long-term suspension can make or break an student’s entire school career. Schools want and need a disciplinary policy that will end disruptions and allow lessons to proceed. A 2004 survey by Public Agenda reveals that one-third of teachers had “seriously considered quitting” because of poor student behavior.
But the disciplinary policy, as currently applied, seems uneven and incoherent. If a student takes lunch money from his peers, is it stealing, or “uncooperative behavior?” The answer will probably determine whether the student is suspended.
The Public Agenda survey, “Teaching Interrupted,” found that 93 percent of parents and 89 percent of teachers support zero tolerance. Still, 44 percent of teachers said that documentation requirements “go beyond common sense,” and “are mainly used to protect the school,” and 52 percent of teachers say “they can’t count on parents to support them” in disciplinary measures. Both parents and teachers said that better enforcement of the little rules would stem the tide of bigger problems.
Strange lessons
As Andrew Coulson , senior education policy analyst at Michigan’s Mackinac Center noted in “Strange Lessons in School Discipline,” the current policy creates a situation in which an organization [the school] whose employees are “sane on an individual level” collectively “loses its grip on reality and reason.” Coulson recounts a nonsensical application of punishment to crimes in our schools, in which unauthorized ingestion of Motrin can lead to two weeks in a correctional school, but a racially motivated gang attack results in brief suspensions for the perpetrators.
According to Coulson, this mismatch is the result of a “proclivity of government bureaucracies for uniform, blindly-enforced rules.” The alternative, judging incidents on a case by cases basis, makes the schools vulnerable to charges of discrimination, he said. Thus it leads to a rubber-stamp approach. According to “Strange Lessons in School Discipline,” “it’s hard to call such a policy discriminatory, but it’s also hard to call it sane.”
Palasek is an assistant editor at Carolina Journal.