Zero tolerance? You're kidding, right?

There’s a lot of anger in my school.  One of my students told me “I’m going to throw you out the window you baldheaded motherf&$er!” Nice.  I sent him to the discipline room immediately.  I got his response for asking him repeatedly to do nasty stuff like sit down, quiet down, get out a pencil, and get out a notebook.  I found out that this boy recently beat a cat to death with a baseball bat for kicks.  Last year he destroyed a classroom.  Warning signs anybody?  Why is this boy here?  I don’t want to get in the way of his education but he needs to be somewhere other than our school.  Every day this boy has a tantrum, refuses to work, throws things, destroys things, and is verbally and physically disruptive.  What’s it going to take?

The boy was back after 30 minutes.  This really undermines my tenuous hold on discipline in the classroom.  We have a zero tolerance policy at our school but it’s a joke.  It’s supposed to apply to threats, intimidation, fighting, and play fighting.  No one has been zero toleranced out of our school this year.  I ought to know.  I’ve had soda cans, bottles, erasers, milk cartons, staplers, the classroom phone, erasers, pencils, pens, wet paper towels, and condoms thrown at me.  I’ve caught more than a few kids red handed.  Have they been expelled or transferred to discipline schools?  Nope.  Have they been given anything more than an overnight suspension?  Nope.  Zero tolerance is a crock.

So much anger in my school and kids will go off over anything or nothing at the drop of a hat.  I’ve had kids ready to clobber each other with chairs over a piece of paper or pencil topper.  They sure look at you funny when you ask them if going to jail for assault and battery is worth it for a used five-cent eraser.  If you weren’t there somebody would go to the hospital for nothing.  So stupid.  We are the only role models some students have.  Their parents will go from zero to 150 over an eraser, too.  It’s so stupid and depressing.

My friend across the hall put things into perspective for me.  “If they wanted us to win they would have set it up differently.”  She’s right.  We have to fight the war with the army we were given (Never thought I’d paraphrase Don Rumsfeld). The school district sets it up like this.  She has 34 students and almost every one of them has profound discipline and emotional problems.  I have 38 students.  At least 20 of them have some kind of profound problem.  It’s a powder keg.  The whole school is packed like this and any moment something awful can happen and usually does.  The school district must like it this way because the more they say it’s changing the more it stays the same.

I heard on All Things Considered tonight that under NCLB they are going to increase to 3% the amount of special education students that can opt out of taking the standardized tests.  That’s a start.  They still want the test scores to go up every year.  I’m not a math guy but at some point this has to become mathematically impossible.  At some point the law of diminishing returns has to take over.  NCLB is a dumb law.  Hopefully it will get the butt kicking it deserves.  It can’t happen soon enough for me.