Close the schools

Last week, the Christina School District in Newark, Delaware, suspended student Zachary Christie and ordered him to attend reform school for 45 days. Mr. Christie's offense was bringing a knife to school.

The district has a zero-tolerance policy for weapons, and certainly nobody wants their kids to go to school in a revival of "West Side Story."

And Zachary Christie didn't just pull a knife. He pulled a fork and a spoon, too. They were all attached, it was a Boy Scout camping utensil.

But Zachary Christie is no Boy Scout.

He's a Cub Scout.

He's six years old.

This is Zachary:



That's his mother on the left and his father on the right. You can see they're giving him some space, seeing how he's armed with that folding fork.

He's probably on the no-fly list already.

Zachary Christie must be very confused right now, because he was just trying to eat lunch with his cool new Cub Scout camping utensil, and the next thing he knows, adults are arguing over his head and he's suspended from school.

Helpfully for Zachary, and for anyone else who's confused, the New York Times dug up a law professor to explain why the Christina School District is right and Zachary's furious parents are wrong.

"There are still serious threats every day in schools," said Dr. Charles P. Ewing, professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School. The Times said Professor Ewing explained that "giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make."

Fair enough.

If school officials are so incompetent or bigoted or stupid that they can't be trusted to judge the difference between a cheerful six-year-old with a camping utensil and a brooding psychopath with a hatchet, there's only one thing to do.

Close the schools.

These people should not be teaching anybody's children. They shouldn't be trusted with a sharpened pencil.

After all, a sharpened pencil could be used to hijack an airplane. That's why the TSA banned crossword puzzle books from airplanes and only allows the much safer tidbits® puzzle books, which can be done with a ballpoint pen.

They also make good vocabulary exercises for home-schooled weapons violators.

The most troubling part of this story is the no-warning, no-mercy, no-counseling policy that sends a perfectly innocent child out of the classroom and off to reform school for making a perfectly innocent mistake. In a sensible world, one in which school officials weren't terrified of being hauled into federal court and sued for discrimination, a sensible school official would sensibly confiscate the dangerous item from the six-year-old and then send a sensible note home to tell the parents that Cub Scout knives aren't allowed in school.

But we don't live in a sensible world.

We live under the Incorporation Doctrine, the Supreme Court's fairly recent interpretation of the Constitution that makes most of the Bill of Rights apply to state and local governments. In practice, this means the justices decide whether school officials have shown a good enough reason for anything they do that might violate a student's rights, like place limits on political demonstrations in class or strip-search students for drugs.

Before the Incorporation Doctrine, state and local officials had the final word. But over the last eighty years and especially in the last fifty, the Supreme Court usurped the powers that the Constitution reserved to the states. Now anyone who feels aggrieved by a school policy can file a federal lawsuit against the school district, and if the case makes it to the Supreme Court, the justices will evaluate the school's reasoning and then effectively substitute their own judgment for the judgment of locally elected school boards.

It's not a career-ender to be sued, unless you're sued for discrimination.

So the zero-tolerance policy permits no discretion, no judgment and no differentiation between Cub Scout utensils and guillotine blades.

The policy works perfectly, exactly as designed.

It's not designed to protect the students from weapons. It's designed to protect the district from lawsuits.

It's not really stupid at all.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: For more information about the Incorporation Doctrine and how it has affected the schools, read the appendix to The 37th Amendment at this link: http://www.ExtremeInk.com/appendix.htm

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