Lake County, FL - Nov. 14, 2013
by Guest columnist: Rick Riker (Rick attends many Lake County FL School Board meetings)
Lake County Schools & Zero Tolerance Related to Students & "Guns"
In response to a number of school shootings, the 1994 Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act which required every school district to establish a zero-tolerance policy for guns. If a district didn’t establish a policy they would lose their federal funding. Over the course of time zero tolerance expanded to drugs, knives, sexual assault, gang paraphernalia, and explosives.
Sounds good but wait. When was it ever legal to bring guns or explosives to school? Was it for show and tell or something to while away your free time on the playground? IT WAS ALWAYS ILLEGAL TO BRING GUNS, DRUGS, KNIVES TO SCHOOL whether or not a school policy was in place.
This meaningless, unnecessary top down act was implemented for one reason and one reason only. Like so many federal acts it was an easy way to show the federal government “felt your pain” and was going to do something about it,
Somewhere between 1994 and 2013 these zero-tolerance policies became zero-tolerance policies on steroids. Zero-tolerance against an actual gun being brought to school morphed into a policy which also included a picture of a gun. These steroid driven policies have effectively replaced common sense with a one size fits all mentality. It deprives school boards, administrators, and teachers the ability to judge every situation individually.
These situations are abundant, all of them slightly different but all of them lacking one thing, the use of common sense in resolving the situation:
Attorney and author John W. Whitehead points out, “ Nine-year-old Patrick Timoney was sent to the principal's office and threatened with suspension after school officials discovered that one of his LEGOs was holding a 2-inch toy gun. That particular LEGO, was a policeman...
David Morales, an 8-year-old Rhode Island student, ran afoul of his school's zero tolerance policies after he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag and tiny plastic Army figures with a gun in honor of American troops.”
Similarly , Ben Boychuk , a policy advisor for education at The Heartland Institute reports “17-year-old Matthew Whalen was suspended from his upstate New York high school last year for having a two-inch knife as part of a survival kit he kept in his car. His principal called the police. It turns out a two-inch knife isn’t considered a weapon in New York state, but the district superintendent suspended the Eagle Scout for 20 days anyway….
Equally outrageous was the case in New Jersey where several kindergartners were suspended from school for three days for playing a make-believe game of "cops and robbers" during recess and using their fingers as guns.
So, what’s the segue from this to our own Lake County School Board?
Easy. After a year of bad press, ie. anti-gay and lesbian viewpoints, teacher getting into an altercations in a bar, sex offenders employed by our schools, cheerleaders uniforms being too short, we don’t need another easily avoided controversy that will waste our time and which makes our school board an easy target for looking foolish.
Not long ago the chairwomen of the board, Kyleen Fisher, made a gun out of her fingers to emphasize a point at workshop meeting. She immediately realized what she had done and apologized. Why did she have to apologize? Was her finger loaded? Of course not, but it does demonstrate the lack of common sense our school board policies use in dealing with such an innocuous gesture. Is this the way the board will react to a student bringing in a picture of the musket used by George Washington in the Revolutionary War?
It’s my hope that the board will review their zero-tolerance policies and incorporate some good old fashioned (which actually never went out of style) common sense. It’s my hope that the next time a student bites a sandwich into the shape of a gun the student will be given an A for creativity and not suspension.
Rick Riker
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