I think I left out an important point in my last post, which would be I don’t have a problem with such a law, as long as it’s not used as a day to day enforcement tool like it was in this case, but *only * as an additional charge in the event of a major event.
The real crime here was serving a steak that required a a knife. A nice Filet Mignon cooked barely medium rare can be cut with a fork.
Administrators are hired to administer – i.e. to make judgment calls based on the specific facts before them and to stand behind their decision.
Again, if they are not willing to do that, they need to be in a line of work that involves hard-wiring the phonemes “Doyouwantfrieswiththat?” into their Broca’s convolutions.
My brother and sister-in-law are both teachers (though my brother these days now works for a nonprofit that develops school curricula). My aunt taught in an inner-city economically distressed school district for thirty-five years, retiring a few months back. For these reasons and others, I have a keen interest in education policy.
And no illusions.
I can tell you this, though - you want to make things worse? Give school officials less power. Less judgment. Less opportunity to display compassion. Make their “decisions” arbitrary ones worthy of nothing but ridicule, even from children.
All of these things are what zero-tolerance does.
We all concede that prohibiting knives from school campuses is a good idea. It’s the zero tolerance that is wrong. What is the point of zero tolerance? It doesn’t stop anyone from bringing knives to school. If they stab someone, they’re gonna get in it deep, zero tolerance or not.
Tell me, what good do zero tolerance policies do?
Of course not. The notion that is is reasonable to prohibit the possession of ordinary dining implements in a lunch room is preposterous on its face.
I am starting to suspect that you cannot read… I absolutely agree that school admins should have discretion, unfortunately they have demonstrated that they are subject to litigation for exercising that discretion. The best solution is make a blanket law, NO KNIVES IN SCHOOL. If some idiots cannot understand it then fuck them for subjecting their kid to prosecution.
Zero tolerance policies take favoritism out of implementing bans on things like knives. They try to ensure that the only people being hassled are not the poor brown kids who look like they are in gangs.
No, I won’t, at least. Knives exist in the world, for a multitude of uses in a school or office environment, and kids need to learn self-control around them.
Yesterday, my daughter pulled every CD off her shelf, ripped the case apart, pulled out the liner notes and switched all the CDs between cases. My husband saw this as evidence that she “needs” an MP3 player instead of CDs and a CD player. His point of view was that then she won’t be able to make such a mess, cause me stress and break her CDs. My point was that, no, she needs to have them taken away for a week with frequent reminders that she can’t have her music to fall asleep to because she didn’t take good care of her things, and then the CDs need to go back into the bedroom for another try. Why? Because she needs to learn how to respect her things, and that won’t happen if she doesn’t have things to respect.
Kids don’t learn to avoid sticking things in outlets when they’re covered all the time. They don’t learn to not touch scissors if there are no scissors on Dad’s desk. They don’t learn to stay out of Mom’s purse if she puts it on a high shelf all the time.
No matter how many things you think of to try and keep kids safe, they will find new and innovative ways to hurt themselves (and others). Doesn’t it make more sense to teach them not to hurt themselves and each other, than to try to out think the imaginations of 200 children in one building?
Avoiding the issue by bubblewrapping kids just prolongs the learning process.
Owning a knife is not inappropriate, even when you’re 9. Using a knife to cut a steak is not inappropriate. Hurting someone, by any physical or emotional means, is inappropriate, and should be punished.
Does it hurt being so dense? Do you find large objects are attracted to your density? I have already quoted the Florida law that excepts unsharpened tableware.
In my personal opinion, absolutely zero good.
If a kid is going to shank his schoolmates, he’ll either ignore the rule, or bring in something that isn’t prohibited (my guess is he’ll do the former, since he’s already going be be breakin’ the law with the whole “shanking” thing).
The only thing zero tolerance does is annoy and inconvenience (and punish) the people who aren’t looking for trouble.
That is hardly the best solution - it leads to idiocy like this.
The best solution would be a limited immunity from lawsuits, applicable to the school and its employees. Such an immunity has precedent and, crafted properly, is perfectly legal.
Post your language for such statutary immunity and I will post why it is full of shit.
No way. That blanket law is an absolute and absolutes in law are just nuts. As soon as you start making exceptions, such as for shop, art, science, or home economics the law becomes meaningless. You end up having to keep all knives in a locked cabinet and doing a count every time one goes out or in and if one happens to get lost suddenly the school is on lockdown.
No, better to have no blanket law and allow school administrators to do their jobs.
See we tried that. In Alabama where I was born, me and my friends got off with a warning. The black guys got arrested. Is that how you want it?
Again, you can have better results in this area without zero tolerance.
We tried that, too. In Illinois where I was born, my friends and I and the people who were doing no harm got handed knives to open boxes for the teacher and help pass out textbooks. We used knives and scissors to cut ribbons for the Homecoming decorations. There were knives in our cafeterias, which we used to attempt to cut the abomination they called pizza. We didn’t try to stab people with any of them, oddly enough.
The people who were idiots, who threatened people and did drugs on school grounds and ditched class, they were the ones who were punished. Didn’t matter what color they were. Seemed to work pretty well as a system.
You keep saying that, but you refuse to demonstrate it.
Of course not. Either you should all have been arrested, or let off with a warning provided the offenses were equal. If what the black kids did was worse, then maybe arrest is appropriate, if it’s the other way around then you should have been arrested and the people who took them in should have faced discrimination charges.
I believe this shows a bit of ignorance in the purpose of administrators. Their job is not to make judgment calls; judgment calls can get them into a lot of trouble, actually. It’s funny…the thread that finally made me become a member after years of lurking was one in which three girls wanted to perform The Vagina Monologues, was given certain limitations by the principal, which they then violated, and the uproar caused by that principal daring to curtail those children’s freedom of speech was massive. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it does make me think that when people want principles to make “judgment calls”, they do so only as long as the call goes in their favor.
No, administrators are on campus to effectively administer the law as it pertains to the students, faculty, and school as an organization. And do paperwork. An obscene amount of paperwork. Discipline, on the level of weapons violations, is absolutely positively not done on a judgment basis, since all it takes is for one kid to skate through to create a precedent. When you get your administrator masters degree or doctorate, there are no “judgment classes”, but there are several school-law classes. We are flat out forbidden to disregard laws we don’t like in the classroom…special educations laws come to mind, where we have to continually be refreshed on those, lest the district get sued. The student handbook alone is thirty pages of state and federal laws, on 8-point type, and every student and parent has to sign off on just to cover our butts, and yes, weapons policies are on them.
Weapons policies are also posted on every gate that leads into our school, for that matter (in accordance with the law - right next to the no smoking statutes).
IF this principal hadn’t done what he was legally required, he could have been fired. I wouldn’t fight that battle for a kid that was breaking the law (and, let’s face it, in these situations the charges almost always get dropped).
Is the law ridiculous? Maaaaaaybe…although I’ve seen enough lawsuit stupidity on the part of parents to be extremely, extremely thankful we have everything written in stone (I’ve said this before…our district faced a situation where a kid walked through a blocked off construction site after a rainstorm, got mud on expensive shoes, his parents sued because there weren’t warnings stating that there was mud. There were danger signs, warning tape, and fences which the kid ignored, but the mud on his shoes got us sued, and the district’s insurance company forced us to settle because it was cheaper not to fight.) I can’t begin to imagine what would happen if a knife was known to be on campus and was actually used, but I am 100% confident that people would blame the school for not being vigilant.
I don’t, however, believe that not allowing knives on campus is a hardship or in the least bit unreasonable.