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Constitutional attorney John F. Whitehead ~ February 6, 2013 |
Unfortunately, children do not organize, have no access to the media,
and do not vote. They are relatively powerless to improve their own condition.
Children need adults who will advocate for them.Professor David Elkind,
Tufts UniversityJust as the 9/11 terrorist attacks created a watershed between the freedoms
we enjoyed and our awareness of Americas vulnerability to attack, so the spate
of school shootings over the past 10-plus years from Columbine to Newtown has
drastically altered the way young people are perceived and treated, transforming
them from innocent bystanders into both victims and culprits. Consequently,
school officials, attempting to both protect and control young people, have
adopted draconian zero tolerance policies, stringent security measures
and
cutting-edge technologies that have all but transformed the schools into
quasi-prisons.In their zeal to make the schools safer, school officials have succumbed to a
near-manic paranoia about anything even remotely connected to guns and violence,
such that a child who brings a piece of paper loosely shaped like a gun to
school is treated as harshly as the youngster who brings an actual gun.Yet, by
majoring in minors, as it were, treating all students as suspects and harshly
punishing kids for innocent mistakes, the schools are setting themselves and us
up for failurenot only by focusing on the wrong individuals and allowing true
threats to go undetected but also by treating young people as if they have no
rights, thereby laying the groundwork for future generations that are altogether
ignorant of their rights as citizens and unprepared to defend them.Nowhere is this more evident than in the increasingly harsh punishments and
investigative tactics being doled out on young people for engaging in childish
behavior or for daring to challenge the authority of school officials. Whereas
in the past, minor behavioral infractions at school such as shooting spitwads
may have warranted a trip to the principals office, in-school detention or a
phone call to ones parents, today, they are elevated to the level of criminal
behavior with all that implies.Consequently, young people are now being
forcibly removed by police officers from the classroom, strip searched,
arrested, handcuffed, transported in the back of police squad cars, and
placed in police holding cells until their frantic parents can get them out. For those
unlucky enough to be targeted for such punishment, the experience will stay with
them long after they are allowed back at school. In fact, it will stay with them
for the rest of their lives in the form of a criminal record.Consider the case of Wilson Reyes, a seven-year-old elementary school student
from the Bronx who got into a scuffle with a classmate over a $5 bill. In
response to the incident, school officials called police, who arrested Reyes,
transported him to the police station and allegedly handcuffed the child to a
wall and interrogated him for ten hours about his behavior and the location of
the money. His family is in the midst of pursuing a lawsuit against the police
and the city for their egregious behavior.A North Carolina public school allegedly
strip-searched a 10-year-old boy in search of a $20 bill lost by another
student, despite the fact that the boy,
J.C., twice told school officials he did not have the missing money. The
assistant principal, a woman, reportedly ordered the fifth grader to disrobe
down to his underwear and subjected him to an aggressive strip-search that
included rimming the edge of his underwear. The missing money was later found in
the school cafeteria.And in Chicago, a 15-year-old boy accused by an anonymous tipster of holding
drugs was taken to a locker room by two security guards, a Chicago police
officer, and a female assistant principal, and made to stand against a wall and
drop his pants while one of the security guards inspected his genitals. No drugs
were found.That students as young as seven years old are being strip searched by school
officials, over missing money, no less, flies in the face of the U.S. Supreme
Courts 2009 ruling in Safford Unif. Sch. Dist. v. Redding. Insisting that
Arizona school officials violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a 13-year-old
girl when they strip-searched her on the suspicion she was hiding
ibuprofen in
her underwear, the justices declared that educators cannot force children to
remove their clothing unless student safety is at risk.Precedent-setting or not, however, the Courts ruling has done little to
improve conditions for young people who are the unfortunate casualties in the
schools so-called quest for student safety. Indeed, with each school
shooting, the climate of intolerance for unacceptable behavior such as getting
into food fights, playing tag, doodling, hugging, kicking, and throwing temper
tantrums only intensifies. And as surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police
patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs and strip
searches become the norm in elementary, middle and high schools across the
nation, the punishments being meted out for childish behavior grow harsher.Even the most innocuous infractions are being shown no leniency, with
school officials expelling a 6-year-old girl for bringing a clear plastic toy
gun to school, issuing a disciplinary warning to a 5-year-old boy who brought a
toy gun built out of Legos to class, and pulling out of school a fifth-grade
girl who had a paper gun with her in class. The six-year-old kindergarten
student in South Carolina was classified as such a threat that shes not even
allowed on school grounds. She cannot even be in my vehicle when I go to pick
up my other children, said the girls mom, Angela McKinney.Nine-year-old Patrick Timoney was sent to the principals office and
threatened with suspension after school officials discovered that one of his
LEGOs was holding a 2-inch toy gun. That particular LEGO, a policeman, was
Patricks favorite because his father is a retired police officer.David
Morales, an 8-year-old Rhode Island student, ran afoul of his schools zero
tolerance policies after he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag
and tiny plastic Army figures in honor of American troops. School officials
declared the hat out of bounds because the toy soldiers were carrying miniature
guns.A 7-year-old New Jersey boy, described by school officials as a nice
kid and a good student, was reported to the police and charged with
possessing an imitation firearm after he brought a toy Nerf-style gun to school.
The gun shoots soft ping pong-type balls.School officials are also exhibiting zero tolerance for the age-old game of
cops and robbers, a playground game I played as a child. In a new wrinkle on
this old game, however, its not the cop who gets the bad guy. Now, the game
ends when school officials summon real cops who arrest the kindergartners for
engaging in juvenile crime. That happened at a New Jersey school, from which
four little boys were suspended for pretending their fingers were guns.
Most
recently, two children at two different schools in Maryland were suspended in
the same month for separate incidents of pretending their fingers were guns. In
another instance, officials at a California elementary school called police when
a little boy was caught playing cops and robbers at recess.
The principal told
the childs parents their child was a terrorist.Unwittingly, the principal was right on target: These are acts of terrorism,
however, the culprits are not overactive schoolchildren. Rather, those guilty of
terrorizing young children and parents nationwide are school officials whoin an
effort to enforce zero tolerance policies against violence, weapons and
drugshave moved our schools into a lockdown mentality.Things have gotten so bad that it doesnt even take a toy gun, pretend or
otherwise, to raise the ire of school officials. A high school sophomore was
suspended for violating the schools no-cell-phone policy after he took a call
from his father, a master sergeant in the U.S. Army who was serving in Iraq at
the time.A 12-year-old New York student was hauled out of school in handcuffs
for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker. In Houston, an 8th grader was
suspended for wearing rosary beads to school in memory of her grandmother (the
school has a zero tolerance policy against the rosary, which the school insists
can be interpreted as a sign of gang involvement). And in Oklahoma, school
officials suspended a first grader simply for using his hand to simulate a gun.With the distinctions between student offenses erased, and all offenses
expellable, we now find ourselves in the midst of what Time magazine described
as a national crackdown on Alka-Seltzer. Indeed, at least 20 children in four
states have been suspended from school for possession of the fizzy tablets in
violation of zero tolerance drug policies. In some jurisdictions, carrying cough
drops, wearing black lipstick or dying your hair blue are actually expellable
offenses.Students have also been penalized for such inane crimes as bringing nail
clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that
resemble switchblades. A 9-year-old boy in Manassas, Virginia, who gave a Certs
breath mint to a classmate, was actually suspended, while a 12-year-old boy who
said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project was charged with
a felony for possessing a look-alike drug.Another 12-year-old was handcuffed
and jailed after he stomped in a puddle, splashing classmates. After students
at a Texas school were assigned to write a scary Halloween story, one
13-year-old chose to write about shooting up a school. Although he received a
passing grade on the story, school officials reported him to the police,
resulting in his spending six days in jail before it was determined that no
crime had been committed.These incidents, while appalling, are the byproducts of an age that values
security over freedom, where police have relatively limitless powers to search
individuals and homes by virtue of their badge, and where the Constitution is
increasingly treated as a historic relic rather than a bulwark against
government abuses. Where we go from here is anyones guess, but the future
doesnt look good from where Im sittingnot for freedom as we know it, and
certainly not for the young people being raised on a diet of abject compliance
to police authority, intolerance for minor offenses, overt surveillance and
outright totalitarianism.
Constitutional attorney and
author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute.
His new book The Freedom Wars (TRI Press) is available online at
www.amazon.com. Information about The Rutherford
Institute is available at
www.rutherford.org