Zero tolerance too tolerant?

When Brainerd High School teacher Shabnam Kaderi Kendall told a male student recently he could not leave her class early, the math teacher was pushed aside as the student walked out the door.

Battery against a teacher falls under a statewide “zero-tolerance” discipline category and carries an automatic 12-month suspension, but Mrs. Kendall’s 16-year-old student was back in her classroom the next day.

“They call it zero tolerance, and it sounds really effective, but it’s not,” she said.

The student now has been suspended, Mrs. Kendall said, but Brainerd administrators were so overwhelmed with discipline problems at the time that they just could not address her issue until the next day.

By the end of school last year, nearly 40 percent of Hamilton County students who had been dismissed for zero-tolerance offenses were back in their original schools.

Zero-tolerance offenses fall into one of three categories: possession of a weapon, possession of illegal drugs or alcohol or battery against a teacher or school staff member. Despite the mandatory yearlong suspension for such offenses, the punishment can be appealed, resulting in an alternate punishment.

Deputy Superintendent Rick Smith is in charge of discipline hearings at the middle and high school level, the source of most of the county’s zero-tolerance offenses.

He said it is important to remove offending students from influential peer groups in their home school environment where they got into trouble in the first place.

Many students removed under zero tolerance spend from 20 days to several months at the Washington School, an alternative campus for students with discipline problems, Mr. Smith said.

Red Bank High School principal Gail Chuy said the alternative school option is not perfect, but she sends students there because it is the system available to her.

“Sometimes just the process of having to leave your school, your friends, that’s enough for some kids,” she said.

School board member Rhonda Thurman heads the board’s discipline committee and said school officials treat zero tolerance with too much tolerance.

“Before we know it, (student offenders) are back in school again,” she said. “When someone assaults a teacher or a principal and they don’t have the credits they need to graduate, they need to be put out of school, period.”

Ms. Thurman said if the school system got tougher on discipline issues and expelled about 250 problem students, the district would “get rid of most of the problems.”

“We’ve got to stop treating them with kid gloves. These kids are old enough to know how to behave,” she said. “I just wonder at what point schools are going to say, ‘We just won’t put up with it anymore.’”

Mr. Smith said his biggest concern is the steady number of zero-tolerance offenses he has processed in the past several years.

“We’re still seeing these far more than I wish we did,” he said. “I saw a little more than 200 last year, and I will see that number this year.”

School officials need to work on getting students to understand the seriousness of zero-tolerance offenses, Mr. Smith said. For that reason, he said meeting with students on a case-by-case basis during their appeal hearings, is beneficial, and hopefully cuts down on the number of repeat offenders.

“These are the kind of things you just don’t need to have happen in your school,” he said.

VIOLENCE AT SCHOOL

As Brainerd High assistant principal LaMonte Vaughn tried to break up a fight Wednesday, he was pushed by a male student, according to the sheriff’s department. The juvenile student was suspended under zero tolerance but can request a discipline hearing. Deputy Superintendent Rick Smith presides over the hearings and said battery against a teacher or school staff member is an especially serious zero-tolerance offense.