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Zero Brain Cells
USA Today
Waiting in line for the bus, a Pennsylvania kindergartener tells her pals she’s going to shoot them with a Hello Kitty toy that makes soap bubbles. In Maryland, two 6-year-old boys pretend their fingers are guns during a playground game of cops and robbers. In Massachusetts, a 5-year-old boy attending an after-school program makes a gun out of Legos and points it at other students while “simulating the sound of gunfire,” as one school official put it.
Kids with active imaginations? Or potential threats to school safety?
Some school officials are taking the latter view, suspending or threatening to suspend small children over behavior their parents consider perfectly normal and age-appropriate — even now, with schools in a state of heightened sensitivity following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in December.
Conceived as a way to improve school security and maintain consistent discipline and order, zero tolerance was enshrined by a 1994 federal law that required states to mandate a minimum one-year expulsion of any student caught with a firearm on school property. Over the years, many states and school districts expanded zero tolerance to include offenses as varied as fighting, skipping school or arguing with a teacher.
Psycho Killer and mother
Some experts say there’s little evidence that zero tolerance — in which certain infractions compel automatic discipline, usually suspension or expulsion — makes schools safer, and contend the policies leads to increased rates of dropouts and involvement with the juvenile justice system. Supporters respond that zero tolerance is a useful and necessary tool for removing disruptive kids from the classroom, and say any problems stem from its misapplication.
The most recent maniacs grew up in a zero tolerance school system. How’d that work out?
Actually, it’s a stupid question because progwaffles aren’t interested in results, they are interested in how their actions make themselves feel. These nitwits are part of the “responsible and adult” faction of the “if it feels good, do it” generation.
persecutor
February 19th, 2013
In response to this ever present problem and danger, Governor Cuomo has asked the Senate and Assembly to pass an Assault Hand and Finger Law, requiring parents to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that children have no more than 7 fingers on any hand, and to Crazy Glue their child’s lips shut to prevent them from blowing bubbles from bubble guns.
Senate Majority Leader Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) said that the GOP would support this measure since it represents a compromise from the Dem Governor’s original proposal to confiscate all fingers from schoolchildren.
Kenny Sullivan
February 19th, 2013
The administators need to be ‘exspelled’.
It wasn’t that long ago that kids brought their guns to school because they went hunting before and after school.
Maudie N Mandeville
February 19th, 2013
We get “Go, Dorner, go!” after murdering innocents. The Hello Kitty bubble shooter is expelled and sent to reeducation camp. But don’t tell liberals that their value system is broken.
Horrorman18
February 19th, 2013
Well it has finally happened…the inmates are running the asylum!….I’ll be taking that lobotomy now Nurse Ratchett
eternal cracker p
February 19th, 2013
Kids are suppose to be disruptive, that’s part of being a kid. Just like they are suppose to use their imagination. Kids don’t necessarily know right from wrong until they cross that line. Implementing a zero tolerance policy doesn’t teach them better behavior, it teaches them how to isolate themselves, it teaches them to not act on any desires, and it makes them depressed. Depressed kids get their bottles full of drugs. That’s when they REALLY don’t understand right from wrong and imagination from reality. And then we stand around like a bunch of retarded progressives and wonder why depressed kids on drugs commit crimes.
Tim
February 19th, 2013
Anyone who would sentence their child to one of those public schools is a hate-filled maggot whose loathing of its offspring will one day redound upon it.
Probably in a bad way.
The kid will eventually pimp them out to the Gestapo.
Billy Fuster
February 19th, 2013
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…more idiotic insane laws and regulations from the left. And this is JUST THE BEGINNING of the totalitarianism they wish to impose. At what point will passive conservatives turn to civil disobedience and the defunding of these delusional bastards (hint hint–tax revolution). Most of you find yourself between a rock and a hard place because you have been cornered by your need for “survival” while being slow-boiled like the proverbial frog. Without action you will soon be fully cooked.
Jimmy
February 19th, 2013
My generation would never have graduated at the rate we played ‘cops and robbers’ and ‘cowboys and Indians’ on the playground with imaginary and simulated guns.
Grace_ia
February 19th, 2013
Zero tolerance of anything in our school system is just a way to absolve ineffective school administrators and teachers from having to use their pea brains to figure out solutions to problems in some kind of creative and helpful way.
Good teachers HATE zero tolerance rules.
old_oaks
February 19th, 2013
I hear everything that goes on at the school, in fact it is too much information. The district called last week to inform me of bugs found in the broccoli that some students may have eaten.
I don’t mind getting the information, it’s the way they deliver it, basically begging parents not to sue or blow the issue out of proportion.
I’m convinced more everyday, I’m surrounded by idiots.
norman einstein
February 19th, 2013
What I find most discouraging about stories like this is that it’s proof that “common sense” has become a thing of the past.
FTA:
“Zero tolerance traces its philosophical roots to the “broken windows” theory of policing, which argues that if petty crime is held in check, more serious crime and disorder are prevented. So it’s no accident that students are often harshly punished over relatively minor misbehavior, said Russell Skiba, a zero tolerance expert at Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy.”
The operative words here are “petty crime”.
When Mayor Giuliani introduced the Broken Window policy to NYC, he was able to clean up the city because he cracked down on CRIME.
A kid making a toy gun out of plastic lego blocks has NOT committed a crime.
These ‘educators’ are actually too thick to tell the difference.
Now I’ll shut up and wait patiently for the next asteroid.
Horrorman18
February 19th, 2013
Zero tolerance with the types of people that apply it this way is just a robotic response that makes them …and only them…feel good that somehow in their pea sized, incapable of thinking outside the box brains that they have single handedly solved the problem
Ty Coon
February 19th, 2013
the worst thing is the humiliation the kids endure from so-called adults who make a big deal about something that they do at home all the time. The mixed signals of what is right and wrong has got to be confusing as hell.
Jeff
February 19th, 2013
Zero Tolerance = Zero Common sense/rational thought.
“But I was only following orders!”
Stranded in Sonoma
February 19th, 2013
But the three strikes laws are bad because libtards say so.
Phuckin’ hypocrites.
Stranded in Sonoma
February 19th, 2013
I have a question. What if the kid uses this as his defense?