SCHOOLS!
Zero Tolerance Means Just That
In California schools, safety comes first.
By Judith Schumann Weizner
he principal of the Telfair Elementary School in Pacoima, Calif., recently suspended a 9-year-old schoolboy when his book bag was found to contain snapshots of himself and his brother at a shooting range. A day later, but not so widely publicized, the entire third grade of the Enfield School in nearby Armageddon was suspended for engaging in verbal violence.
The Pacoima suspension was subsequently rescinded, but the two incidents underscore the seriousness with which school administrators across the country are treating violations of zero-tolerance policies enacted to make schools violence-free.
The mass suspension in Armageddon grew out of a creative-writing assignment in which the children were asked to compose short stories on subjects of their own choice. Katy Winchester, the Enfield School's creative-writing teacher, told reporters that she had been stunned to discover the extent to which the 9-year-olds had internalized their violent culture.
"This was not a cooperative assignment, but anyone could see the common thread running throughout the lot of them. For example, one child, writing about a cruise he had taken with his parents last winter, described the ocean as being 'gunmetal' in color. Another told of an intruder who came into his home and 'rifled' the bedrooms. There are other, perfectly good words that these children could have used, such as a 'greyish' ocean or bedrooms that had been 'messed with,' but instead they chose weapons-related imagery. It is very distressing to see this level of violence in the writing of third-grade students."
The wholesale suspension of a class of 9-year-olds is a considerable embarrassment to the Armageddon school district, which pioneered several methods of reducing aggression in the student body. First in the nation to mandate non-competitive games on the playground, Armageddon's school board even forbids its teachers to call the roll alphabetically, since A and B are often perceived as "better" than subsequent letters, no doubt a holdover from letter grading.
Several months ago, Bertha Gattling, President of the Armageddon Board of Education, initiated a one-of-a-kind program to reduce the violence that students are exposed to outside the school. "We realize we can't control what the children see on TV at home," she says, "but if we can get a sense of what they are watching and what video games they are playing, we can identify potentially violent kids and deal with them before their problems get out of hand."
Referring to the district's "Tele-tot" program, Ms. Gattling explained that upon enrollment in any of Armageddon's elementary schools, each child is assigned a buddy who promises to report any conversations indicating that his partner may be exposed to violent TV programming at home. The program is set to extend to the upper grades next year, where it will be known as "Tele-teen."
Last spring, many parents in Armageddon signed "Cable Covenants" with the school board, promising not to watch any WWF presentations beginning before 10:00 p.m., as well as certain situation dramas and early-evening news broadcasts. The Cable Covenants program got off to a slow start, but participation increased after the non-participating parents of a 6-year-old, who did not have access to the Cable Covenants Index, were tried for child abuse stemming from allegations that they had watched reruns of "Hunter" while their child was within earshot. The parents' claim that their son had been upstairs asleep was not enough to prevent his removal into a safer home, as the district attorney was able to demonstrate that the child might have been able to hear the program from his bedroom had he been awake.
Ms. Winchester says she supports every effort to reduce school violence, including the suspension of four New Jersey kindergarteners for playing cops-and-robbers, and that she fully agrees with the Pacoima school's attempted suspension of the young marksman. "If they had not suspended that child," she says, "they would have been sending the message that it's all right to shoot guns."
Ms. Winchester says that although she had long felt that children's violent impulses needed to be curbed, she became particularly sensitized by the Columbine massacre. She insists that the third graders' compositions prove the point that it is not enough simply to forbid children to read and write about violent subjects (a teacher in the Armageddon High School was fired three years ago for assigning The Murders in the Rue Morgue to his sophomore class), but that adults must be vigilant in seeking to eradicate even the most seemingly insignificant hints of any incipient violent tendencies.
"If children can't be free from violent images in school, where can they be?" Ms. Winchester asks. "I realize now that I'll have to sensitize even my youngest students to the proper choice of words to keep them from being deadened, I mean desensitized, through constant unthinking use of violent images. Over the winter holidays I'll be compiling a reference list of words to be avoided. This will include the casual use of words like 'trigger,' 'magazine,' and 'muzzle,' as well as any words containing the letters 'g-u-n' and 'a-r-m'." When asked whether this means, for example, that an Armenian student would be forbidden to refer to his national origin, Ms. Winchester said, "He'll just have to find another way to describe himself."
The third-grade teacher still faces possible disciplinary action due to her class's suspension, but seems philosophical about it. "I suppose I must bear the responsibility for this to some degree," she told this reporter yesterday. "Apparently I failed to make clear to the children exactly what we mean by zero tolerance."
This morning, even as the Armageddon School Board was weighing the duration of the third grade's suspension, a 12-year-old was suspended for bringing violence-related reading material to school. An unconfirmed report indicated that a search of the student's book bag had uncovered a copy of the Second Amendment.
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