Well, Doubleclick, you guessed wrong. Schools - or rather, the people who work in schools - have unions in order to protect their rights as state employees and use collective bargaining to secure better employment contracts. I have yet to meet a single teacher, staff member, or administrator who was complacent to the point of laziness over the problems faced by their schools’ populations. However, that’s a whole other Great Debate.
The biggest problem I see in schools is an abominable lack of resources. There aren’t enough schools, classrooms, teachers, janitors, nurses, textbooks, what-have-you for all the students. The end result is that no one has the time to address each incident, learn the details, and apply appropriate solutions (boot one kid out, send the second to counseling, arrest the third kid, apologize to the fourth, and thank the fifth). So, instead of owning up to this problem and being labeled as a lazy, troublemaking, whistle-blowing, hand-out begging incompetant, they come up with a policy that sounds good but really only makes the problem worse.
Some of these policies are worse than others. For instance, the ZT for drugs policy has a point. To a layperson, it can be hard to tell the difference between, oh, a 300 mg gelcoated buffered aspirin pill and an illegal pharmaceutical of another sort. Schools don’t have the manpower - and shouldn’t waste it - on checking every student’s OTC medication for prohibited substances. Have the kids stop at the nurse’s office for aspirin, Midol, and other OTC medications and either keep a parental/guardian permission slip on file or let the nurse call the parent/guardian for confirmation.
As far as weapons go, it makes sense to completely ban all firearms from school campus. Where it gets weird is when they expand the definition of “weapon” to include things no sane child would ever consider using with violence. After all, when you get down to it, anything can become a weapon - pencils, pens, desks, scantron forms, football coaches, whatever. The bizarre nature of some of the weapons-carrying allegations only shows that the policy writers:
a) have no contact with students on a day-to-day basis
b) couldn’t carry a thought out to a logical conclusion if someone held a loaded scantron to their head
c) are more concerned with covering their butt from potential litigation by the outraged parents of a child injured in a scantron assault than they are with making sense
d) all of the above
More and more authority has been taken away from the people who actually make a school work - the administrators, the faculty, and the staff. Some of this is the ebb and flow of pedagogical politics, but way too much of this has to do with the fact that there are far too few resources for far too many students.
Lightin’, I never got into a fight as a student, but I totally empathize with your experiences. There was one teacher and a counselor who finally listened to me and put a stop to the girls who’d made a sport of making me cry. Before - and after, unfortunately - them, none of my teachers made the smallest effort. As a future teacher, that is one thing I know I will never tolerate in my class.