Perhaps now would be a good time to interject that ZeroIntelligence.net is updating again, and to point out the many examples of Zero Tolerance gone stupidly wrong that it chronicles.

Looking at a good many of them, one doesn't have to have been a troublemaker to see that something ain't quite right.

I suppose it is easy to engage in apologetics when you weren't suspended for doodling on the back of your hand.

Has it occurred to you that we could possibly change court policy so that schools have protection from litigation which they can reasonably prove they had no control over? Do I have to re-quote the article?

A fucking plastic knife so he could cut cookies! They give kids pencils and those have a greater risk of being used to injure themselves and other kids. This isn't just a stop-gap it's completely retarded.

It's not that it isn't wrong, but I'm talking lesser of two evils.

Edit: Taking anecdotal evidence is hardly a way to convince me that it isn't working. I mean, that website Styphon posted had 3 years of blog posts with about 4-8 per month. It's hardly an epidemic if, over all the bad things that happen, about 100 people got in trouble for ridiculous reasons.

Edit 2: Taking anecdotal evidence is hardly a way to convince me that it isn't worthwhile.

Good GOD FREAKING JESUS I hate 0-Tolerance. What kind of mindless garbage are they trying to promote? That is NOT Satyagraha! When attacked, one must defend one's self, and yet, with zero tolerance, you can't, you just scream for a teacher, who's probably getting a real kick out of it so they wont stop it.

If only this world were eye for eye like it ought to be, and if only the justice system were "Guilty until proven innocent" with likewise judgement of eye for eye. Then, everything would run smother.

Oh, OK.

SOMEBODY got suspended for writing Trenchcoat Mafia fanfiction, didn't they?

I'm 31, not 13. I know the difference between reasonable suspicion and litigophobia. I was also never subjected to such asinine blanket policies in my public school career.

So you're wrong on that one.

I have no children, nor do I own property, so I don't pay school taxes either. Demographically, I have no vested interest in public schools.

My only concern is the gradual, consistent erosion of small liberties, and the fearmongering that causes it. It's wise to be vigilant. It's foolish to live in fear. And that seems to be the difference: wise administrators could easily discern the difference between the judicious and menacing uses of a plastic knife.

It's not about righting wrongs inflicted upon me, because there were none. I just don't like the apparent direction of an educational system that reinforces the idea that all people who like to use silverware are would-be felons.

I'm still allowed to be a conscientious objector, aren't I?

Shouldn't most of this zero-tolerance stuff be chalked more up to over aggressive administrators? As someone else earlier in the thread mentioned, their school had a "zero tolerance" policy but until 9/11 it wasn't enforced too harshly. Likewise in my school, we had no zero tolerance policy, yet kids got in trouble for similar incidents.

Nope. I meant to blanket my statement over every single person that has ever lived that objects to zero tolerance and to not exclude anyone even if it doesn't make sense.

(Or I could read every post in this thread again and see that many posts apply to what I said.)

(Or you could argue on the merits of what I have to say about the topic itself, but that would mean you'd have to address issues like liability and other areas where minors don't have rights, neither of which you've touched on.)

Tales from the Schoolhouse Morgue Pt1:

Not to be a sob story, but I have this bitch homeroom teacher, right: and she is racist as hell. She's the kind of person for whom EVERY month is Black History Month (which is rather racist in itself, wouldn't you say??). And she hates white people, especially me, because I wear black (it suits me) so to her I MUST BE GOTH... oh noes...
so one day she says to the class that a black guy founded the red cross. Completely wrong, it was a white woman named Clara Barton, any fool knows that... so I try to PEACEFULLY (read quietly with much Satyagraha) correct her. and you know what she said?
GET OUT OF MY CLASS.
So I said fuck you and left.

Only the other day did I find out she had no right to do so, but after I talked to the counselor about switching homerooms (he's a lying sack of YES-MAN bullshit) he said she had every right to do so.

Then she calls my house to demand an apology, and my parents tell her to deal with it.

Now I have to see her ugly ass 1/144 African-American (read white girl who married a black guy and had a black great great great great great great x 10^10 grandfather) self on monday.

And now for the punch line:
I'm not white, I'm 1/4 Asian American. So WHY THE HELL IS SHE TELLIN ME MY ANCESTERS WERE SLAVE OWNERS??? (which even my 3/4ths didn't own slaves, because I'm from a historically proletariat family who's been in and out of poverty since time eternal)

</sobstory>

My roommate at college became an inevitable victim of zero-tolerance post-Columbine. In fact, he's mentioned as being the first example of this following Columbine in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (though not by name).
This situation was the pretty stereotypical scrawny kid who got picked on/ignored by teachers and made a hit list type thing on the back of a notebook to blow off some steam. Anyway, someone saw it (actually, his date for a dance, prom perhaps) and reported it to a teacher and things snowballed from there. He got expelled from the school and after that went back and forth between a few different high schools. The superintendent (who he told me was a massive cunt) pushed heavily for a jail sentence - this would have happened too, and he'd still be in jail but it was declared a mistrial as the police who investigated his house came in while he and his brother were without their parents (which I believe is illegal).
After this, he went into the military and became a really huge dude, but he's basically been blacklisted in his town (Howell, NJ, I think, that's where he lives now at least). He told me that throughout high school he was immediately blamed for anything that seemed like a terroristic threat anywhere within a 100 mile radius of him (one was a bomb threat, which ended up being made by a spanish teacher).

I understand the mindset of "better safe than sorry", but in the instances posed by the OP, it's overkill. There are so many variables in these types of cases--in all cases, really: the nature of the (alleged) offense, the person(s) in question, etc.. The fact that a myriad of circumstances could surround the event(s) brought up by those in charge make ZTPs inherently obsolete.