Hobbit
Senior Member
While I'm in the middle of ranting on schools (thanks to the new education section), let's discuss yet another idiocy in public schools, that being zero tolerance policies. For those who don't know, a zero tolerance policy is a rediculously strict rule that a school implements to prevent any faculty member from having to think. More specifically, they typically ban certain objects, but since they're 'zero tolerance,' they also ban anything else that may loosely resemble those objects or substances. When people complain, the faculty can always just blame the rule.
For those who don't seem to understand the blight that is the zero tolerance trend, here are a few examples of when they go wrong, which is often, and these are just the ones I've seen personally.
A kid at my middle school was having a small headache problem from like an ear infection or something and brought Tylenol to school. The parent thought the policy that drugs must be checked in with the nurse meant perscriptions. The kid was caught with Tylenol and suspended for five days, the same they gave to the kids they caught with meth.
A guy at my high school (a state-funded honors boarding school) was working with his dad the day he came back to school after the weekend and accidentally left a keychain sized, dull pocketknife in his pocket. When he realized this, he tucked it in a drawer in his room so he could take it back home the next weekend. That week, the school did a thorough search of his entire suite after a maintanence guy went in to change a light bulb and saw a picture of an automatic weapon on his desktop (yes, that's right, it was a Mac 10 on a joke background for Mac OS X, and this constituted a thorough search of the room). After threatening to expel all three in the suite for having PVC pipe (which can be made into pipe bombs, apparently), they settled for expelling the guy for a knife that would be harder to kill with than bare hands.
At the same school, I, along with 4 other students, was almost suspended for leaving campus without checking out...to walk across the street to push a guy's stalled truck into a parking lot...with about a hundred people watching (the hour between study hours and curfew, so everybody was on the front lawn).
You see, zero tolerance policies are just another rediculous product of beauracracy that looks ten times better on paper than it could ever work. Like middle schools, it's a policy that simply doesn't work and needs to go away before it ruins the lives of more innocent kids.
For those who don't seem to understand the blight that is the zero tolerance trend, here are a few examples of when they go wrong, which is often, and these are just the ones I've seen personally.
A kid at my middle school was having a small headache problem from like an ear infection or something and brought Tylenol to school. The parent thought the policy that drugs must be checked in with the nurse meant perscriptions. The kid was caught with Tylenol and suspended for five days, the same they gave to the kids they caught with meth.
A guy at my high school (a state-funded honors boarding school) was working with his dad the day he came back to school after the weekend and accidentally left a keychain sized, dull pocketknife in his pocket. When he realized this, he tucked it in a drawer in his room so he could take it back home the next weekend. That week, the school did a thorough search of his entire suite after a maintanence guy went in to change a light bulb and saw a picture of an automatic weapon on his desktop (yes, that's right, it was a Mac 10 on a joke background for Mac OS X, and this constituted a thorough search of the room). After threatening to expel all three in the suite for having PVC pipe (which can be made into pipe bombs, apparently), they settled for expelling the guy for a knife that would be harder to kill with than bare hands.
At the same school, I, along with 4 other students, was almost suspended for leaving campus without checking out...to walk across the street to push a guy's stalled truck into a parking lot...with about a hundred people watching (the hour between study hours and curfew, so everybody was on the front lawn).
You see, zero tolerance policies are just another rediculous product of beauracracy that looks ten times better on paper than it could ever work. Like middle schools, it's a policy that simply doesn't work and needs to go away before it ruins the lives of more innocent kids.
