Posted 5:21 PM by Susan Darst Williams

LET’S REPORT STOOOOPID ZERO-TOLERANCE INCIDENTS

I ran across an education blog that apparently reports on ridiculous discipline cases in schools. Written by a father in Atlanta, the site reports cases of overzealous administrators using zero tolerance policies ham-fistedly.

Go see www.ZeroIntelligence.net

I’ve thought for years that zero tolerance policies were boneheaded, because the very kids who need to be in school are the ones who are usually kicked out, and rarely for anything that’s really scary. The ones that make me maddest are the cases in which kids confoundedly get suspensions for doing the right thing; there was one in the Omaha Public Schools last year, if you’ll recall, when a middle-school boy reported an attempted drug buy, but went about it the wrong way and got canned for his honesty.

This other site shows the extent of the problem nationwide. I still can’t quite believe that a Wisconsin girl who was forced to perform oral sex on a boy got suspended because she had been involved in the incident . . . or that students around the country are being suspended and expelled for the crimes of possessing scissors and over-the-counter medications.

Another one that really gets me is an Oklahoma girl who has a disease in her ovaries and needs a form of birth-control medication to treat it. Usually, she takes the medication at home, but one day, it was in her locker at school, and was found by a drug-sniffing dog. Her penalty: suspension for a year.

I’d like to send any Nebraska ‘’zero tolerance abuse’’ stories to this website in the future, so if you run across any, send them my way . . . and let see what we can do to drive the number of them to ZERO, because they’re intolerably stoooopid.