What Ever Happened To Zero Tolerance

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher, and wounded 24 others, before taking their own lives. After this incident Columbine High School became a household name, and panic reigned through high schools in America. There have been other school shootings since the Columbine massacre. Recently, there were five school shootings in a period of one week. After the Columbine incident, schools in the country all seemed to have their guard up and were professing that they would do anything to assure the parents and the students in the community that this type of catastrophic event would not happen at their school.

Every state made it mandatory for school districts to have a zero-tolerance policy for weapons, and made it clear that the only thing that students had to do was threaten violence to another student or to the school, and they would suffer the consequence of expulsion, and have criminal charges filed.

That was eight or nine years ago, and I am afraid that the scales are being tipped again in the direction of permissiveness. A window of gray has once again become the lens in which violence is viewed mainly because of the lawsuits filed by angry parents whose children have been expelled or disciplined for potentially violent behavior. The fear of lawsuits does instill fear into the minds of administrators who have forgotten the terror that a school shooting brings to the students and to the parents in a community.

I field questions all the time either from parents online or in person. I was stunned by one parent who wrote to me about threats that were made to her daughter by a boy in her class. The boy developed a brochure on his computer that listed the ways in which he would like to kill this girl. The parent brought this to the attention of administration who said to the parent that he would talk to the boy. And that's exactly what he did, that's all he did, talk to the boy. There were no consequences. Many years ago (about eight) if this had occurred in a school where I was working as an administrator, the boy would have had to be removed from the school, and would not have been allowed to return until he was given clearance by a psychologist that he was not a threat to himself or others. I don't think anyone can be sure today, if an individual would or would not follow through on a threat. I believe that it is far better to err on the side of caution.

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