This was made very clear to me when I went to high school (from 2004-2009). If you had a gun, or a toy gun, or two pieces of wood nailed at a right angle and held like a gun, and you so much as brought it onto the school grounds, you would be handed over to the police and recommended for expulsion.
I'm 100% sure that next week, at least one high school kid will be expelled for something like this. It won't make the news, because there won't be a fleet of outraged tumblr users to champion the kid, because he won't have a name like Ahmed Mohammed. Probably he'll be black, because hey, school to prison pipeline has to pump, but he could just as easily be white.
It's not like the school administrators have any leeway in enforcing district policy. The principal would get fired if he just went "Well, you brought something that we have to expel you for, but you're a good kid, don't do it again." That's how you get favoritism and corruption and it's not something we should try to encourage.
Instead, we should attack the actual problem here, which is the zero tolerance policy. You can't get Donald Trump soundbytes about zero tolerance policies, but that's the actual problem.
This was made very clear to me when I went to high school (from 2004-2009). If you had a gun, or a toy gun, or two pieces of wood nailed at a right angle and held like a gun, and you so much as brought it onto the school grounds, you would be handed over to the police and recommended for expulsion.
I'm 100% sure that next week, at least one high school kid will be expelled for something like this. It won't make the news, because there won't be a fleet of outraged tumblr users to champion the kid, because he won't have a name like Ahmed Mohammed. Probably he'll be black, because hey, school to prison pipeline has to pump, but he could just as easily be white.
It's not like the school administrators have any leeway in enforcing district policy. The principal would get fired if he just went "Well, you brought something that we have to expel you for, but you're a good kid, don't do it again." That's how you get favoritism and corruption and it's not something we should try to encourage.
Instead, we should attack the actual problem here, which is the zero tolerance policy. You can't get Donald Trump soundbytes about zero tolerance policies, but that's the actual problem.