Menace To Society
We should increase teachers' pay, because it is a well known fact that higher compensation attracts greater talent, and if we had greater talent in our public education system, we might be able to do away with genuinely dumb shit like the incident in the linked article below. Zachary Christie of Newark, Delaware, six years old, has been ordered to reform school for forty-five days. Little Zach was excited about joining the Cub Scouts, so he brought a camp eating utensil, a folding combination of fork, knife, and spoon, to school, to use at lunchtime. This puts him in violation of the school's zero tolerance weapons policy. His parents are now home schooling the Little Z, instead of sending him to the reformatory. Good for them.
It turns out this kind of thing happens all the time. The mass killings at Columbine and Virginia Tech have inspired a lot of zero tolerance policies in this nation's schools. But both Columbine and Virginia Tech had strict bans on firearms and IEDs in place on the days of their massacres, yet the massacres happened anyway, which might inspire a thinking person to suppose that zero tolerance policies so inflexible that six year-olds are being shipped to reform school because they brought their Cub Scout fork to lunch are doing more harm than good.
To be clear, little Zach didn't shank anybody. He didn't threaten to shank anybody. He didn't rob a classmate of their Optimus Prime at folding fork point. He just wanted to eat his lunch. If I were the principal, I'd say, "Zach, don't you know we have a rule against knives? You'll get this back at the end of the day. And if you bring it back to school, then you'll find out what trouble is."
But no. Throwing him in six year-old jail is the policy today. This is most richly awful when you consider that a well sharpened #2 pencil will make do as a stiletto. Do they have a zero tolerance policy on pencils?
And how *do* you get to be a high school principal without having the ability to foresee how you will look on the news when you react to a six year-old Cub Scout bringing a folding fork to lunch like you've just identified the Zodiac killer?
It turns out this kind of thing happens all the time. The mass killings at Columbine and Virginia Tech have inspired a lot of zero tolerance policies in this nation's schools. But both Columbine and Virginia Tech had strict bans on firearms and IEDs in place on the days of their massacres, yet the massacres happened anyway, which might inspire a thinking person to suppose that zero tolerance policies so inflexible that six year-olds are being shipped to reform school because they brought their Cub Scout fork to lunch are doing more harm than good.
To be clear, little Zach didn't shank anybody. He didn't threaten to shank anybody. He didn't rob a classmate of their Optimus Prime at folding fork point. He just wanted to eat his lunch. If I were the principal, I'd say, "Zach, don't you know we have a rule against knives? You'll get this back at the end of the day. And if you bring it back to school, then you'll find out what trouble is."
But no. Throwing him in six year-old jail is the policy today. This is most richly awful when you consider that a well sharpened #2 pencil will make do as a stiletto. Do they have a zero tolerance policy on pencils?
And how *do* you get to be a high school principal without having the ability to foresee how you will look on the news when you react to a six year-old Cub Scout bringing a folding fork to lunch like you've just identified the Zodiac killer?