Pretty good idea, one that I agree with. What happens when a knife gets left in the car after the campout, or after moving grandma? In my scenario, we let the faculty have some leeway. Under the current system, there is NO excuse or rationale. We end up with kids expelled, or sent to the local alternative school.
Right, which could mean more kids missing out on an education over something very minor.
New bumper sticker
“Context Matters”
The part where you asked “…will you at least concede that prohibiting knives from school campuses is a reasonable idea?” There’s no mention of school-sanctioned activities in the question I responded to.
And you still haven’t answered why using an eating utensil to eat a lunch in a school approved room is not a “school-sactioned activity”, anyway.
Why not? If they’re doing no harm with their knives, they’re not “bad kids”. If they’re “bad kids”, discipline (or help) them for that.
Most schools have these types of hearings for students that break the school rules. They usually don’t involve teachers (that could actually have legal privacy issues and implications) and usually go from the dean to the administrators to the district or something. There’s other subtleties I think you’re missing in that, as well; it’s not so cut and dried as just randomly choosing three teachers to vote (Vote? Vote on what? Is there a trial or something? Have the teachers been trained appropriately for this situation? Is it 3 out of 3 or out of 5 or what? I could go on.)
However, it’s all irrelevant when it’s not even a school issue - it’s a state or federal one, and schools don’t have the ability to ignore that.
That’s a tough steak…
All right. Take a deep breath. Log off. Go run around the block a couple of times. Get yourself under control. Then, when you come back, don’t let your emotions control your posting.
Your posts in this thread are mostly angry, pointless handwaving and this one is a direct violation of Forum rules (while others have run up along the rule boundary to the point where your keyboard has scraped paint on it).
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Zero Tolerance and Political Correctness – two forms of stupidity that synergistically combine into a black hole from which no rational thought can escape.
So, you recognize that “zero tolerance” is an evil way of treating people as subhuman?
I’m glad that a bit of sanity is starting to creep in…
We’ve already hashed out the reasons why this is stupid.
Hang on - there is both a school rule AND a criminal law here. The courts can’t give detention, and the school can’t charge you with a crime.
I was discussing how the school should deal with school rule breakers. I do realize that individual schools do not necessarily pass their own individual zero tolerance rules - I was simply writing thoughts on how to deal with infractions of “dangerous items” rules that have been put in place in recent years.
Again - we have a kid getting a 10 day suspension automatically for bringing a steak knife to school to eat her lunch. That sounds really dumb to me, and is an attack on sensibility in the name of safety.
Sorry, I was refering to the idea of calling the cops on the girl. Whatever the school system has in place for bringing weapons to school is irrelevant when it comes to reporting to the police. That’s what I meant.
Replacing “bad judgement” with “no judgement at all” is hardly the way to fix things since it leads to situations that make the ones in charge look even more incompetent. This leads to people having less faith in them, making everyone even more afraid, and perpetuating the cycle of incompetence.
Wait a minute. What’s wrong with bringing a knife to school?
People are acting as if the punishment is just too harsh. How about the rule is stupid?
Anybody who wants to can throw kids off of the top of the bleachers, or stab them with pencils, or beat them to death with baseball bats or folding chairs; schools aren’t safe. Sorry to burst your bubble but this isn’t fantasy land. Everywhere you go on Earth is unsafe. People, especially children, need to learn to live with it and mitigate those dangers. Pretending to construct a safe environment where nobody can get hurt is dangerous.
Stabbing, shooting and hurting people should be serious crimes. Having the capability to do so is just human nature, and should not be punished; else we may forget how to control those capabilities without outside help.
I had a feeling we were missing each other in communication on that one!
Aside comment - thanks for teaching. I have family in Arizona, so consider this my little bit of thanks for putting up with them. Happy holidays, and may you enjoy the adult beverage of your choice while you are grading papers over the break!
Scissors, they have really pointy ends and can hurt when stabbing someone, including yourself, regardless of the intent. I dont recall anyone mentioning scissors…
Zero tolerance? Can we say: Why We Punished Rape Victim
So… she broke the laws, does it make the punishment RIGHT?
I have to weigh in on the side that says this was over-reaction.
In **askeptic’s ** defense, it does seem that teen-agers seem more hell-bent on violence than ever before. I don’t think it’s actually unreasonable to prohibit the presence of knives in some settings. Out here on the Colorado prairie where I live, you’d get laughed out of the school board meeting for suggesting such a thing, but in Denver it’s probbly not beyond the pale.
For those trying to equate guns with knives, however, I can offer this perspective: In the very small, very rural town where I grew up, one did not take a gun to school for any reason. When I was in fourth grade I demontrated the proper, safe way to break down and clean my little single-shot .22 rifle, but my father brought the rifle in for just that purpose, supervised my demonstration, and immediately took the gun home afterward. That was in 1963. Pop went to school in a one-room schoolhouse in the Colorado sandhills in the 1930s, and according to him, nobody ever took a gun to school to “do a little hunting” during lunch. On the other hand, kids out here carry pocketknives everywhere, and a farmboy feels just plain nekkid without his multitool on his belt. If you walk into a classroom and see a kid wearing Levi jeans and Justin boots, it’s a good bet she’s got a buck knife in her pocket.
how does that response to what appears to be a completely reasonable judgement based rule that is not zero tolerance but surely allows for teachers to take action against potential threats AT ALL help you in this debate? This sounds like a completely reasonable rule that would allow such things as, for example, steak knives, or X-acto blades, or Putty knives, to be used in proper context while still allowing teachers to, say, confiscate those same items in inappropriate settings, say… the middle of the hallway.
The point at debate here should not be “was the zero-tolerance policy implemented correctly in this case” (inarguably, the teachers followed policy as written) but “should zero-tolerance be rewritten or abandoned completely for a more reasonable standard” and I have yet to see a solid argument in favor of that, especially now that what appears to be a reasonable alternative has been posted.
Why do you think that teenagers are more hell-bent on violence than ever before? That simply isn’t true in any way although our media exposure leads people to believe things like that. Almost all categories of crime are sharply down from their highs both in youth and adults and have been for a number of years. Break out your own stats if you want to refute what I am saying but I get dismayed when normal adults don’t have this ingrained as common knowledge for the the late 1990’s until today.
We live in a golden age of a lack of crime and the U.S. currently has a very low crime rate by world standards including western Europe in all categories except in the highly targeted violent ones like murder. Common U.S. citizens are much safer today in terms of individual crime risk than they would be in almost any major country at any time.
However, this doesn’t give any credit to zero tolerance policies for any of this. Check out crime in the early 1990’s but also the 1930’s for example with a remission thereafter.
Stupid not to have knives in school?
Stabbings are less likely to happen if there are not knives in schools. Obviously, removing knives does not make a school completely safe, but there is no compelling reason for a student to have a knife in school in the first place. There are compelling reasons for chairs, pencils, etc.
Asking teachers to be responsible for assessing whether individual students should or should not be carrying knives is impractical and takes away from what they should be doing – educating young people. Many students are perfectly capable of carrying and using knives, but many are not. Better to deprive a student of carrying something that they dont need than risk a tragedy.