[Tax-chick]

See tagline. Texas has an excellent homeschooling statute.

[Will88]

The vast majority of the suspensions or expulsons were for non violent offenses, and most were at the discretion of school administrators, not police.

So, this writer thinks schools should take disciplinary action only if student behavior involves violence and the necessity of police involvement?

This entire article has a PC stench about it and the stats sound pretty doubtful.

[BitWielder1]

I never understood why "Zero Tolerance" implies automatic Draconian punishments for every little thing.
Even under the auspices of "Zero Tolerance" we should still be able to exact a measured and appropriate response to an infraction.
Verbal warning, note to parents, suspension or call police, as appropriate for each individual case. Age appropriate too.
You don't call the cops and suspend a 7-year old boy for kissing a girl.
Liberals have very poor sense of proportion. That's where it failed.
The purpose of discipline is to teach the kids proper behavior, not to make them live in constant fear.
That's totalitarianism.
Maybe the real purpose is to get kids used to exactly that.

[lapsus calami]

 

Even in non-urban Texas, we do have the Zero Tolerance insanity.

 

Last year, a friend's fourth-grade son got nailed for pointing his pencil at pictures on the wall around a classroom and making pow-pow noises. Oh good grief, they did everything but call the cops (and that almost happened, too). Kid was set to face expulsion and the whole nine-yards. His mom went up to the school and quizzed the teacher -

 

"Was he actually threatening you or any student?"

 

"Nooo"

 

"Was anyone actually injured in any way?"

 

"Well, no"

 

"Can a #2 lead pencil shoot real bullets?"

 

"Um, no"

 

That all shook down to the kid getting some in-school suspension - when he shouldn't have gotten any punishment - but his mom did explain to him not to be doing anything like that again since that can get the sort of ridiculous over-reaction that created his then-present ordeal. This was at a semi-rural school district near Waco, and the woman-child teacher was an early twenty-something, single, childless transplant from California.

 

[freekitty]

Translation: The less educated they are; the more controllable they are.