The news came out this morning that Zachary Christie, a 6-year-old Delaware first-grader, is back to school. He made news by bringing a small pocketknife with a fork and a spoon to his school. His mother didn’t know he did it. He didn’t know he shouldn’t have done it. He just wanted to bring his cool new camping tool to school to eat his lunch.
He had faced 45 days of suspension from his school, and enrollment in an alternative school for troublemakers, after violating the school district’s “zero tolerance” policy on bringing weapons to school. According to today’s story about the case, the “Christina School Board voted unanimously Tuesday to reduce the punishment for kindergartners and first-graders who take weapons to school or commit violent offenses to a suspension ranging from three to five days.”
The board used its discretion to change the rules based on the circumstances of this case. So the zero tolerance policy wasn’t, really, zero tolerance. Is that so wrong?
Obviously, nobody thinks weapons should be allowed in schools. The punishment for that should be harsh. Obviously, it would have been nice if Zachary’s mom knew he was bringing it and could have prevented it. But a strict reliance on that belief could only come from someone who has never had a 6-year-old kid. Be as vigilant as you want; something is going to slip past your notice.
So it seems to me the right decision was made here.
But do you agree? If not, why? Can you ever imagine a time when the circumstances would make a zero tolerance policy useless? Don’t we have sayings like “that’s the exception that proves the rule” or “rules were made to be broken”?
If you agree that the right decision was made, can you imagine a situation, a crime so horrible, that “zero tolerance” would be the right approach? Can you imagine completely removing the discretion of the rule-makers from the individual circumstances of a case?
By Kurt Greenbaum
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