Daily Lobo Columnist
Tuesday night, Estero High School in Estero, Fla., held its graduation ceremonies. One of the graduating seniors was not allowed to attend. Lindsay Brown, a National Merit Scholar and honor student who had never before been in trouble at school, was suspended for having a kitchen knife in her car.
The knife, which Brown says fell out of a box while she was moving, was sitting on the floor of her car in the school’s parking lot, where some observant school official happened to notice it. According to the school’s zero-tolerance policy, that counts as possession of a weapon on campus.
Nothing mitigates this crime in the eyes of the school or the school board.
The lack of a means, reason or motive doesn’t affect the decision to keep Brown from participating in the school’s graduation ceremony.
This case is reminiscent of a similar incident closer to home, when Rio Rancho High School freshman Kara Williams was suspended for the rest of the semester because a keychain pocketknife was in her backpack. Despite the fact that an average rock is far more deadly than an inch-long pocketknife, the zero-tolerance policy strikes again.
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These incidents are becoming all too common in schools around the nation. Thanks to well-publicized incidents of school violence such as the massacre at Columbine High School, administrators are seeking to make their campuses safer by strictly punishing students for anything they can construe as a weapons offense. In doing so, they lump Lindsay Brown and Kara Williams in the same league as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Not only is this gravely unjust, it is dangerous.
Students who are planning acts of violence at their school are not likely to submit to having their backpacks searched. Nor are they likely to leave their weapons in their cars, far from reach.
Training school personnel, parents and students to believe that school violence can be prevented by randomly searching students’ property is a fallacy. The most terrible school shootings in recent years would not have been stopped by threats such as these — they were planned in advance by their perpetrators, and the attacks were launched soon after the students arrived at the school.
More importantly, however, applying a “zero tolerance” policy to students who clearly violated the rules unintentionally undermines young people’s faith in the rule of law. High school students are being confronted with an overwhelming flood of rules. No private property rights exist on campus. Anything can be searched by the administrators without provocation. Students have few rights under the newest breed of school policies.
They have no power to appeal an administrator’s decision, except to take the issue to court, and the courts generally uphold the schools. No explanations are allowed. The rules are enforced verbatim without exceptions.
It may seem silly to adults jaded by the real world, but, in many ways, schools are a microcosm of the real world that not only teach academics, but also the basics of authority. They see their school’s authority as deriving from the state, and their distrust and dislike for “the system” will stay with them after they leave school.
While it should be the goal of every school to teach students about civil rights and civic responsibility, it should not be done by pitting them against an authoritarian hierarchy. The historical lesson these schools are failing to remember is that oppression creates rebels, not safety.
By turning schools into regimented training camps, administrators are pushing many of their students away, teaching them that they are individually of no value. Teen problems like smoking, drug and alcohol use, delinquency, angst, and depression are worsened by tougher rules, not solved.
The worst aspect of schools’ behavior is their refusal to consider motives.
When a fight breaks out, the teachers and principals never bother to figure out what started it. Bullies are punished exactly the same as those they bully. Any student caught trying to stop a fight is treated as though they started it. What better way to destroy a child’s sense of right and wrong than to punish bullies and bullied alike?
Though they are young, children and teenagers are people too. They have reasons for what they do, and they understand injustice when they see it. We should be giving some credit to students’ intelligence, especially by the time they are in high school. Seemingly trivial matters of school discipline have a great deal to do with the kind of person a student will become.
When we read about cases like Lindsay Brown and Kara Williams, we have to wonder what their schools are really teaching them.
