Clearly what he should have done is use an x-acto knife to cut the picture of the gun out of his assignment. Would you get suspended for turning in homework with a gun-shaped hole in it? What are they going to do, suspend you for turning in homework without a gun drawn on it? 
The AFT?
Splitters!
You need to understand that school board members and administrators live in constant fear. Here is how Will Rogers, way back in the 1930s, described “What’s wrong with our schools”: The teachers are afraid of the administrators, the administrators are afraid of the school board, the school board members are afraid of the parents, the parents are afraid of the kids and the kids know it.
That may not be correct order, but it went something like that. Seriously, none of these people are really afraid of another Columbine – everyone is in cmoplete denial that it could ever “happen here” until it happens, and then they’re stunned that it could ever actually happen. But what they are afraid of, and deathly so, is lawsuits. No matter what they do or don’t do, the school district is a perfect target for a lawsuit. I can’t provide a cite, but at one time, when I was covering the local school district, I saw a statistic to the effect that every single day in America, at least one school employee in every district in America does something that someone has already found actionable. Zero Tolerance is the only defense they have.
It’s true, and they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they do, then you inevitably get outrageous enforcements like this one seems to be. If they don’t, and something bad happens, then they are seen as not doing due diligence.
Schools have abdicated thinking for themselves to escape the consequences of predators they’ve educated — those with degrees in jurisprudence. It’s all just so fucking bizarre.
So, now you’re saying it’s necessary, and that the teachers and admin do need Zero Tolerance policies, after all.
But they’re imposed by the school boards, without any input from the teachers or admin.
:rolleyes:
Seriously, if you wish to argue that “Zero Tolerance” policies are necessary in our current litigation-mad culture, I’d be willing to listen quite politely to that argument. When you claim that the teachers and administration don’t have any say in setting these policies, and that they don’t want them, I’m going to argue, because I don’t think that’s valid.
Rabid defense? A kid gets suspended for drawing a picture of what doesn’t quite look like a gun, and you call the parents objecting rabid? If the kid had been in trouble, don’t you think it is less likely they’d raise a fuss, if only because it might come out? What would you recommend parents doing in this situation? We don’t know that they didn’t go through channels and get stonewalled.
BTW, the “trigger” looks to me like the head and arms of one of the stick figures. When I used to doodle, I’d start with a box or something and randomly add stuff. This picture looks like it was made in just this way.
I don’t think that’s what we’re saying at all. At least I’m not. What is needed is some elected leadership with the courage to fight the lawsuits and the courage to close the schools to children who can’t or won’t be taught. And as surely as I say that, a Doper out there will get irate about his/her special needs child, and the whole thing starts all over again.
Seriously, public schools need to stop being all things to all people. A public education should be that – an education, not a babysitting service. That’s just the first step. And they need to stand firmly behind their teachers, and parents absolutely must begin to understand that the only way they will get a decent educatioin for their children is to back the teachers in the classrooms, too.
I’ll quit before this becomes a full-on rant.
Heck, I remember doodling huge battle scenes, with bombs exploding and planes crashing during dull classes. My 9 year-old understanding of history prompted one side’s symbol be a swastika and the other’s a star of David, and though my sense of drama required each side be taking casualties, the Jews were invariably winning.
I kinda wish I still had those notebooks, actually. Good times.
And what makes it a defense ? Do you think that someone contemplating a lawsuit is going to care that what they object to was done under the zero tolerance label ? If anything it makes things worse, both by making stupid behavior by the school more likely, and by pinning responsibility for that stupidity on the whole school and not one stupid teacher. And as we’ve seen, zero tolerance both makes schools look bad and makes people angry at them.
I know that a zero tolerance rule would make me far more likely to vote “guilty” on a jury, because that makes the problem a premeditated one.
That sounds about right…although you also have to realize that there’s the DO - the District Office - that probably does the imposing.
I think the disconnect here is that people really and truly don’t understand how little power teachers have.
Teacher -> Team Leader -> Department Chair -> School Administrators -> Curriculum Chair -> District Office -> School Board. That’s six levels above teacher that have total control over what we do. Believe me, I don’t have input when someone at the district level decides to impose a new rule.
Arizona Teach, I’m not trying to argue that individual teachers are pushing this nonsense. But I also think that it’s unrealistic to deny that most school boards are going to formulate policy only after taking advice from representatives of the teachers - often the teacher’s union.
So, one the one hand, the individual teacher, in the classroom, isn’t going to be making this policy.
But on the other hand, I believe that it’s a fantasy to claim that teachers as a collective group don’t affect the policies that get handed down to them by school boards. The AFT may be splitters, and not part of the (AIUI) much larger NEA, but the cite I offered seemed to be pretty clear evidence that some “education professionals” have lobbied for this.
If a union represenative comes out strongly for any measure I believe that it can become very hard for other voices to be heard. The arguments I’ve heard in similar situations are often, “We’re the ones in the situation, day-in, day-out. We know what needs doing.” Which can be very hard to rebut. The cliche is the appeal, “Won’t someone think of the children?” One reason it’s a cliche, though, is that it works.
As Sunrazor said, zero tolerance policies are a reaction to the accusations that schools aren’t tough enough on kids, that they let kids get away with too much, punishments aren’t harsh enough, so you get situations like Columbine. People want to feel that the schools are being diligent in protecting kids against the predations of other kids… but if the ZT goes too far, then they feel the schools are persecuting kids over silly things.
I don’t think any teacher or admin wants to have his/her discretion in disciplining kids taken away by a rigid, dogmatic ZT policy. I hear lots of Dopers calling the ZT’s an “abdication of responsibilty” or not wanting to deal with kids as individual human beings. I agree with that. I also agree with what Sunrazor said, that teachers want objective recourse in situations where a kid needs to be disciplined but the parents won’t help. And there are certain things for which there SHOULD be zero tolerance.
It’s a complicated situation, and I don’t think teachers actually get much say in how it works, despite what the AFT or NEA says about it. I don’t get much say in the union’s national level leadership either. If one of my students did a drawing of a gun that made me go :dubious: (probably there’d have to be lots of other stuff involved to get me to the point where I was worried) , and I told someone above me about it, and then ZT madness kicked in and the kid got a 5 day suspension, there’d be very little I, as his teacher, could do about it. I know this from experience.
What I’m saying is, it probably isn’t just about the stupid drawing. We can’t know if it is because we’ve only got one side of the story. Their defense of him alone isn’t enough to persuade me.
You wouldn’t believe what lengths people would go to in defense of their children, even if the kid is dead wrong and guilty as sin. So, no, that alone wouldn’t convince me that the parents were completely in the right and the school completely wrong.
They automatically get a superintendent’s hearing-- there is due process. Trying the case in the press, when the school is bound by confidentiality not to talk about the case, isn’t going to prove to me that the parents are telling the whole truth. They might be, but it’s likely that they’re not.
Hmmm…I wonder if they’re censoring the creative choices the kids are making in art class. Fuckin’ morons.
To be honest, no. Based on my parents’ experiences as teachers, problem kids frequently have problem parents, and for every set of parents that comes into a disciplinary meeting saying “how do we get Junior back on track?”, there’s another that will kick, scream, curse and threaten because obviously everyone in The System is out to get their kid.
That of course doesn’t mean this kid was a trouble-maker. It could be a ZT-happy bureaucrobot on a power trip, it could be a trouble-maker with a history who broke the camel’s back with a very insignificant-looking straw, or it could be a very straightforward disciplinary issue but the parents (or the kid) are only giving us a small and very distorted part of the story. Or it could be anywhere in between.
I can beat that in a darker sort of way–on the last day of high school (1975) in the East Bay, I was a freshman and it was day to goof around–teachers would dress up in costume and water balloons would be tossed, etc. One teacher I remembered dressed up as a hillbilly and was carrying a fake .22 rifle. At one point during the ruckus, he raised the barrel and fired a shot into the air.
“Oh,” I thought, “that gun isn’t a fake.”
I wasn’t sure if it was a blank, but it got deathly quiet as everyone was stunned by such a crazy antic–from a teacher, no less!. He smiled and walked away, and we all started giggling and laughing. About 20 minutes later, people started getting more and more out of control (shooting off fire extinguisher, tossing firecrackers in the library), the PA system announced that school was closing and to leave the campus.
I still wonder, to this day, if the teacher ever got reprimanded or the school was closed because of the incident; I never found out as I moved that summer down to the central coast of California.
Even though I thought the teacher was rather foolish for doing this, I never gave what he did a second thought. What a difference 30+ years makes… 
After seeing the sktech, I realize my son should have been expelled in about second grade, permanently. His drawings of knives and guns were much more realistic than that drawing! And the article even says it “resembles” a gun! Which it does, barely…
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
"We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule
"We have–
“Hey, wait! Where are you taking me? I was just singing a song! It’s traditional! It’s-- wait, what’s with the white van? What’s mmph mmmph!”
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That’s a nice drawing of an angle bracket, but how does it relate to the issue at hand?