North Carolinaís public schools work hard to strike a balance between disciplining those who misbehave and educating all students. Zero tolerance for serious infractions should not mean zero education for students who break the rules.
Nor should it mean zero chance to exercise judgment in meting out penalties.
That appears to be the message behind a bill the N.C. Senate approved 50-0 Wednesday aimed at zero-tolerance policies, Senate Bill 648. If the House approves the measure, schools would have fewer automatic suspensions. Also, expelling or suspending a student for more than 10 days would be limited to serious violations that threaten safety or seriously disrupt school.
That may seem like a no-brainer, and in fact it may be the practice of most school systems. Dr. Walter Hart, assistant superintendent of the Rowan-Salisbury Schools, says last year the system had about 4,500 short-term suspensions and 30 long-term suspensions of more than 10 days. The system has a handbook of carefully spelled-out rules, levels of consequences and appeals procedures.
But across the nation, examples have surfaced in which zero-tolerance policies appeared to go too far ó an Oklahoma City first-grader punished for gesturing with his finger as if he was shooting a gun, a Colorado drill team member suspended for having practice rifles in her car.
In North Carolina, a 17-year-old Sanford girl, an athlete who takes college-level courses, was suspended last fall for the rest of her senior year after a small paring knife was found in her lunchbox. She said she had picked up her fatherís lunchbox, which held an apple and a knife to slice it.
Bill sponsor Sen. Jean Preston, R-Carteret, says the bill is needed to give ěmore common sense in determining what is serious and needs (a child) to be expelled and what is not.î
Also, students suspended too long or too often are prone to drop out ó creating what some have called the ěschool-to-prison pipeline.î Schools should not quickly discard students who most need an education. Hence the different levels of penalties and the use of alternative schools.
Under the proposed law, conduct that would not warrant a long-term suspension includes use of inappropriate or disrespectful language, noncompliance with a staff directive, dress code violations and minor physical altercations that do not involve weapons or injury.
Consider this a redefining. As Hart puts it, you can have zero tolerance for misbehavior without automatically kicking a student out for 10 days.
A student who brings a firearm or destructive device on campus would still face an automatic one-year suspension; thatís a federal law. But state law should recognize there are many levels of misbehavior, and administrators need leeway in dealing with them ó not just mandates.