Editorial: Intolerant school policies

Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.

Less than a month before most of the nation's children head back to school, a national psychologists' group is calling for more leniency in "zero-tolerance" policies, saying that such hard-line rules don't work.

According to a story by USA Today, the American Psychological Association said zero-tolerance policies should be reserved for only the most serious threats to students' safety, yet they are being too widely applied, too often.

The policies arose in the 1990s as a way to more aggressively combat drug use and violence in schools. Since then they have been expanded to bullying and other behaviors and are to the point that a child can be suspended for taking an aspirin or innocently showing affection to a friend. Cecil Reynolds, a psychologist at Texas A&M University, told USA Today of a kindergarten boy who was suspended for sexual harassment after he hugged two classmates.

"Bringing an aspirin to school is not the same as cocaine," he told the newspaper. "A plastic knife isn't the same as a handgun." These are common-sense judgments that, in the absence of zero-tolerance policies, teachers and school administrators have typically been able to make.

One Indiana University educational psychologist also told USA Today that zero-tolerance policies actually may be hurting more students than they are helping. "Things that used to be handled by principals (now) land kids in juvenile detention," he said. Such penalties should be reserved for real crimes, not classroom missteps.

The National School Boards Association has urged local boards to give school administrators more leeway in handling discipline. That sounds like a good start.

School is a place for children to learn not only academic subjects but also how to get along with others and follow basic rules of conduct. We don't want to raise a generation of children who aren't able to discern the difference between an aspirin and an illegal substance. There is a difference, but zero-tolerance policies don't teach it.