We Need Zero Tolerance Laws against Abject Stupidity!
Really Stupid Behavior by “Our Servants and Employees”
Common sense has clearly gone out of the window in this country.
The letters and E-Mails I receive about the tragedies of Zero Tolerance enforcement and its long-term effects on innocent children would break your heart. The news reports are equally disturbing.
Good, honest, obedient students, with great potential are being placed in the same ‘special schools’ as hard-core gang members, drug dealers, addicts and other juvenile delinquent types. Here they can learn the worst of the worst from real delinquents.
Laws treating a second grade child with a plastic butter knife the same as a 17 year-old gang-banger with a machete are yet another way for those in authority to avoid responsibility for decisions, and avoid decisions altogether.
( See Also: A De-evolution of Leadership )
Loveland Colorado:
Source: Denver Post
Imagine a Seven Year old child who wants to save the World from evil.
So — in his childlike (because, he is a child) mind, he filled an imaginary box with imaginary evil.
The well meaning little boy then blew up the imaginary box of evil with a totally imaginary grenade.
(Not a rock or something else as a pretend grenade, but a totally imaginary one.)
In the boy’s Seven Year old imagination, he was a playground hero, and just saved the World from evil.
End of story?
Far From It.
Parent Mandie Watkins said Mary Blair principal Valerie Lara-Black called her to inform her that her second-grade son, Alex, had been suspended.
As reported by the Denver Post, the child is now “confused,” because he got in trouble “for trying to save the world from evil.”
Apparently this particular school, like all others, bans fighting and weapons, as well they should.
Here Comes the However …
Their policy also bans Imaginary Fighting and Imaginary Weapons.
Here we have an institution supposedly dedicated to fostering creativity and imagination, actively working to suppress it.
We also have a very confused child, who has now learned a couple of life’s valuable lessons.
Life Isn’t Fair and You Can’t Trust Adults.
Zero Tolerance laws serve one purpose in child development — they teach children some these valuable lessons.
- Life is Not Fair
- Distrust Adults
- Doing the Right Thing Isn’t Necessarily the Right Thing
- Distrust Authority
- The Police are Not Your Friends
… potentially the most dangerous lesson that we may be teaching our children …
Keep Your Thoughts and Dreams to Yourself
Think about it! Almost ALL serial killers, mass murderers and such are described … “he was such a quiet boy,” and “He always kept to himself.”
If we want children to learn just how arbitrary and corrupt the adults in power can be, then we’re succeeding quite well.
Below are a few examples. — Only space and the reader’s tolerance for idiocy prevent me from listing many more.
Some of the Rampant Stupidity (Random snippets from random sources)
- Administration at Roscoe Middle School banned 14 Year Old C.B. and others from wearing any form of metal bracelet, anklet or necklace to school because they constituted weapons.
- Fifth-graders in California who adorned their graduation mortarboards with tiny toy plastic soldiers to support troops in Iraq were forced to cut off their miniature weapons.
- Rubber bands are a controlled item at Young Middle Magnet School of Mathematics, Science & Technology in Tampa FL. In a December newsletter, the Buffalo Bulletin, administrators warned parents and students …
“There have been recent incidences of students at our school using rubber bands as a method of projecting objects at other people.” “Rubber bands are not permitted at school. If students are in possession of rubber bands for any reason they will be subject to consequences that may include out of school suspension.”
“When rubber bands are required for classroom use, they will be provided and collected.”
What’s next, banning of ball point pens and soda straws as the students switch to deadly spit balls?
- “A 13-year-old student in Orange County, Fla., was suspended for 10 days and could be banned from school over an alleged assault with a rubber band…” “Robert Gomez, a seventh-grader at Liberty Middle School, said he picked up a rubber band at school and slipped it on his wrist.” “Gomez said when his science teacher demanded the rubber band, the student said he tossed it on her desk.”
“After the incident, Gomez received a 10-day suspension for threatening his teacher with what administrators say was a weapon…” “The district said a Level 4 offense includes the use of any object or instrument used to make a threat or inflict harm, including a rubber band.”
- “Two boys, ages 9 and 10, were charged with felonies and taken away from school in handcuffs, accused of making violent drawings of stick figures.”
“The boys were arrested Monday on charges of making a written threat to kill or harm another person, a second-degree felony. The special education students used pencil and red crayon to draw primitive stick figure scenes on scrap paper that showed a 10-year-old classmate being stabbed and hung, police said.”
- VA: Joyce Heath said her 8-year-old son returned to school yesterday after a seven-day suspension for carrying a butter knife to school with his lunch. Nicholas, a third-grader, initially was suspended for 10 days and faced the possibility of being placed in disciplinary classes for a year.”
Heath said she packed a butter knife in her son’s lunch along with a package of peanut butter and jelly. ‘I didn’t think about it,’ she said.
- (Caution – In Some California Schools, Possession of a Peanut is grounds for expulsion.
- A Texas school district tried to expel a 16-year-old high school student for a year when a butter knife was spotted in the back of his pickup truck.
- Wisconsin: A sixth-grader gets suspended because of a science project. The project involved cutting an onion. He brought a kitchen knife to school.
- Texas: This zero-tolerance idiocy comes from Ft. Worth. Cory Henson plays baseball on the Diamond Hill-Jarvis baseball team. In the trunk of his car is his baseball equipment, including aluminum bats. In the front seat of his car was a souvenir baseball bat, made of wood and 8″ long. Ft. Worth government school officials decided that the 8″ bat was weapon! The real aluminum baseball bats are not.
- Missouri: It is just a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. A fifth-grade student drew a picture of an airplane flying into a building. Suspended.
- A third-grader has a brother serving in the Army in Afghanistan. The proud third-grader draws a picture of his brother at his sit stand desk in his elementary school classroom. The drawing shows his brother, a United States Army soldier, with a gun. Suspended.If all children were suspended for drawing people they look up to, the schools would have no students in their classroom desks!
- Havre Montana Public Schools Superintendent Kirk Miller said an 11-year-old student brought an unloaded .22-caliber pistol that he found to Sunnyside Intermediate School with the intent to turn it over to school authorities, just the way he should have. The child immediately took the weapon to the school principal, Miller said. The gun was missing a part and could not be fired.
Havre police responded at 8:51 a.m.. and took the juvenile to the police station for questioning. He was issued a summons on a charge of possessing a weapon in a school building, police said.”
- Seven fourth-grade boys in Centennial, Colo., were sent home from Dry Creek Elementary School for pointing their fingers at each other like guns in a game of army vs. aliens on the playground.
- Three seventh-graders in a South Side Chicago public grade school were charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver after school officials found them selling plastic bags of purple powder for a quarter each.
“It was grape Kool-Aid powder, ” they told school officials, “It’s grape Kool-Aid” to no avail, said their attorney, Michelle Light.
“They were rounded up and hauled off down to the police station,” Light said. “No one ever suggested it was anything but grape Kool-Aid.”
Even when a lawyer from the national firm of Baker & McKenzie stepped in, prosecutors refused to drop the charges and wanted the boys to agree to counseling. After three months, prosecutors finally agreed to test the purple powder. It was (surprise) Kool-Aid. Charges against the boys were finally dropped, but not without inflicting serious psychological and economic harm to the accused and their families. - A Florida high school student tape recorded a chemistry lecture for later study. Apparently this was against school policy.. Was she reprimanded and sent back to class with a stern lecture on policy as she should have been? NO! She was criminally charged under the state Wire Tap law.
- A 12 year old girl got a year in custody for sexual assault for going on a “Play Date” with two 11 year old girls.
- More schools are banning dodge ball and tag because the games encourage “violent behavior.”
- Some schools are removing any references to the modern military from their libraries, and some high schools are banning military recruiters from their property.
- Elementary students in Texas and Louisiana have been suspended for pointing pencils and saying “pow” and drawing pictures of soldiers. A fifth-grader in St. Petersburg, Fla., was arrested for drawing pictures of “weapons.”
- Students in Mississippi were held in jail for throwing peanuts at one another.
- “Terrorist threat” criminal charges were filed against two 8-year-olds in Irvington, N.J., for “playing cops and robbers with a paper gun.” Another unintended consequence and abuse of the Patriot Act.
- A young boy was suspended from elementary school for pointing his finger at someone and saying “Bang.” It seems the school’s Zero Tolerance rule extends to “Pretend” guns, including fingers.
- Another school will let kids point fingers, but only if they have a “Permit” from their parents.
- 6 year old was tossed out of school for bringing his father’s pager for show and tell. It seems it’s classified as drug paraphernalia.
- A Boy Scout (excellent ‘A’ student) returning from camp was suspended from school because he left his axe and knife in his car along with the rest of his camping gear.
- An 11 year-old girl was suspended for 10 days from Garrett Middle School in Atlanta. It seems that the (10 inch ‘bead type’) chain connecting her key ring to her Tweetie Bird wallet was in violation of the school’s “Weapons Policy.”
Stupid prosecutions and errant behavior aren’t just limited to children.
A North Carolina man, Jerry Ward was prosecuted, convicted and fined under a little-used 1805 Adultery Law. He admitted cohabiting with his girlfriend and having sex. District Judge Jimmy Myers, a bachelor and ordained Methodist minister, prosecuted Ward and his girlfriend Wendy Gunter. The adultery law prohibits a man and woman who aren’t married to each other to “lewdly and lasciviously associate, bed and cohabit together”. A request to have the charges thrown out was denied, reports The Charlotte Observer. The case came about during evidence given at a custody hearing over Mrs. Gunter’s children.
A veteran DC Policeman issued 28 parking tickets for failing to park with the front wheels turned to the curb, ON A LEVEL STREET! Meanwhile real criminals are at work two blocks away raping two women.
During Tropical Storm Floyd a woman allowed neighbors (who had to flee their homes because of rising waters) to bring their pets to her home where they’d be safe from the floods. She saved 97 animals. She also received a summons for setting up a “temporary animal shelter”, and faced a $1000 fine.
Charges were eventually dropped, but she was warned not to, “illegally save any animals lives again. ”
When are the powers that be going to wake up, display some common sense and admit they are STUPID to seven decimal places?
When are the people who are supposed to be in charge of this country (the voters) going to take it back?
But that’s another rant!
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