Taking Zero Tolerance to the Limit

SMYRNA, Ga. —  Mrs. Ellingsen, the French teacher, was Cosmo’s favorite. “She was the funniest,” the 13-year-old honors student said. “She was the nicest.” On his A-average report card last December, she reciprocated. “A pleasure to have in class,” she wrote. “Enthusiastic.”

Every Christmas, Cosmo gives his favorite teachers a present. He sits down with his parents--a renowned telescope designer and a veteran flight attendant--and they decide on a gift tailored to the special tastes of each instructor. This year, it was a teapot for his social studies teacher. A set of salt-and-pepper shakers for his English teacher. And for his French teacher, French wine--Baron Philippe de Rothschild’s Mouton Cadet, courtesy of the Bordeaux region, to be exact.

Cosmo put the bottle in a box and wrapped it in elf-spotted paper and a bow. He gave it to her, beaming, two days before winter vacation. “She opened it up and said, “Merci beaucoup,’ ” the eighth-grader recalled. “I thought it was a great gift. I mean, she told us she had lived in France. I assumed she would at least drink a little wine.”

When it comes to drugs and alcohol, however, the Cobb County School District here in suburban Atlanta is guided by a policy of “zero tolerance,” not joie de vivre. As she is required to do, Betsey Ellingsen turned over the contraband to the Griffin Middle School principal, Shirley Bachus. Bachus (a name shared, coincidentally, with Bacchus, the Roman god of wine) summoned the offender to her office. And Cosmo Zinkow--college-prep student, All-Star first baseman, blues guitarist, scratch golfer, aspiring astronaut--found himself in the deepest trouble of his young academic life, slapped with a two-week suspension.

“Zero tolerance means zero tolerance,” explained Jay Dillon, the district’s director of communications. “In matters of student safety, we can’t take chances.”

All across America, educators are embracing that absolutist philosophy--no slip-ups, no exceptions, no excuses. In a growing number of celebrated cases, no common sense also might be added to the litany. But with schools everywhere feeling besieged--by disruptive students as well as by litigious parents--many administrators see zero tolerance as a last line of defense, a tough and consistent response to the fraying fabric of their communities.

The rules are seductively simple. Every weapon is a weapon, whether it’s an AK-47 or a Boy Scout camping knife. Every drug is a drug, whether it’s a rock of cocaine or a Tylenol tablet. And every violation is met by a predetermined punishment--ranging from suspension to expulsion--whether the violator’s heart is malevolent or benign. No need for hand-wringing, for weighing mitigating factors, for considering the ambiguities of each student history and parental circumstance. Breach the security of the school and you’re gone.

“Too much is at stake,” said Gary Marx, spokesman for the American Assn. of School Administrators, which represents about 15,000 superintendents and other top officials. “If the rules appear strict, well, that’s just the price we pay for maintaining the sanctity of the learning environment.”

The impulse to stand firm, to reduce all choices to right or wrong, permeates more than just school campuses these days. Zero tolerance has become a mantra for the ‘90s--a call for order, for discipline, for a society that punishes bad behavior, instead of rewarding it with a movie deal.

Zero Tolerance for Infinite Situations

Zero tolerance is applied in Fortune 500 corporations and in the U.S. armed forces, in churches and courtrooms and shopping malls, by Los Angeles County restaurant inspectors and by police on the streets of Disneyland. There is zero tolerance for sexual harassment, for racial discrimination and for hazing, zero tolerance for graffiti, for gang attire and for jaywalking, zero tolerance for public imbibing on the Fourth of July and for shooting off guns on New Year’s Eve.

President Clinton has backed zero tolerance--for terrorism, for drug trafficking, for teenage drinking and driving--in at least 29 speeches. In this newspaper, the number of stories mentioning “zero tolerance” has jumped more than 400% since the start of the decade--with the phrase appearing last year, on average, once every 2.5 days.

As a rallying cry, this is a no-lose proposition; nobody, after all, wants to tolerate repugnant or criminal conduct. But as a practical matter, zero tolerance sometimes means zero options, a one-size-fits-all punishment for offenses that are not always equally offensive. It is one thing to say that guns and drugs have no place in schools. It is quite another to use those rules against students like these, all suspended for violating zero tolerance policies in recent years:

* A 13-year-old Oregon boy, for taking a swig of Scope after lunch.

* A 13-year-old Texas girl, for carrying a bottle of Advil, detected in her backpack by a drug-sniffing dog.

* A seventh-grader in West Virginia, for giving a zinc cough lozenge to a friend.

* An eighth-grader in Pennsylvania, for trying to get laughs by sucking on an Alka-Seltzer tablet.

* A 17-year-old Georgia girl, for bringing an African tribal knife to her world history class.

* A 5-year-old Virginia boy, for taking his mother’s beeper on a kindergarten trip to the pumpkin patch.

* An 11-year-old North Carolina boy, for passing around a home-grown chili pepper that caused another child’s face to swell up.

* And another North Carolina boy, 6-year-old Johnathan Prevette, who made headlines for planting an unwelcome kiss on the cheek of a first-grade classmate.

“If this is how we treat our kids, we might as well be communists,” said Gina Coslett, 34, a social worker from Longmont, Colo., a suburb of Denver.

Last month, Coslett’s 10-year-old daughter, Shanon, became the latest child to call the righteousness of zero tolerance into question. An A-student at a rigorous charter academy that emphasizes “character education,” Shanon was preparing her lunch one morning, only to discover that she had forgotten to bring her lunch box home from school. So the fifth-grader threw her pasta salad and crackers into her mother’s lunch box, a soft nylon pack with a mesh pocket under the top flap.

At lunch time, Shanon opened it up and began to eat. Only after she was finished did she notice that the wooden handle of an old steak knife was sticking out of the pouch.

“I eat a green apple every day,” explained her mother, who uses the knife to slice the fruit. “Shanon didn’t even recognize the knife. She didn’t know that I carried one in my lunch box. She didn’t have any idea where it came from.”

But Shanon, an athletic girl with straight blond hair and oval-framed glasses, did know what to do. She raised her hand, expressed her surprise to the cafeteria attendant and handed over the utensil.

“At a quarter to 3, they called me,” Coslett said. “They said that Shanon had brought a deadly weapon to school and was being expelled. I could hear her crying in the background. It was just unimaginable to me. Then I realized it was my knife and I was so relieved. I was thinking, this is ridiculous, I’m going to fix this and it’s going to be over tomorrow.”

But Twin Peaks Charter Academy--a private school that opened last fall under the domain of the public St. Vrain Valley School District--really did mean to kick out Shanon. Under the Colorado Safe Schools Act of 1993, any student possessing a knife with a blade of 3 inches or longer must be expelled. “You can see why,” Principal Dorothy Marlatt wrote in a letter to all parents, describing how “violence in the schools had been hemorrhaging.” Before zero tolerance, she added, “school officials often were inconsistent and often capricious on how they dealt with weapons.”

Student safety--and the future of Twin Peaks’ charter--demanded that the law be strictly upheld. “They’re so afraid, they’re not even exercising normal, everyday, living skills,” said Coslett, sipping hot tea in her kitchen on a recent evening, while Shanon rounded up a dozen jars of polish and focused on painting her nails.

She is back in class now, reinstated by the St. Vrain Valley school board after missing two days. “I’m not even in disagreement with zero tolerance,” her mother said. “I mean, I understand that there’s a massive breakdown in society, and it breaks my heart and scares me to death that there are 10-year-olds in gangs selling crack. But this is Shanon--a 10-year-old honors student with a kitchen utensil.”

Knife in Lunchbox Lands Girl in Squad Car

Actually, Shanon was lucky. Two years ago, another honors student, South Carolina sixth-grader Charlotte Kirk, packed a knife in her lunch box to cut up a piece of leftover chicken. (Her parents taught her not to eat with her fingers.) She got hauled away in a squad car.

“Zero tolerance is a simplistic political response to an incredibly complicated social issue,” said Peter Blauvelt, president of the Maryland-based National Alliance for Safe Schools, a nonprofit consulting group run by former school security directors. “It sells well. But, God, we’ve already got rules upon rules upon rules. We’re paying our educators to be decision-makers. Make the goddamn decisions that have to be made!”

One of the reasons educators say they are reluctant to make judgment calls is the fear of liability. Suspending a student for carrying a Tylenol may seem severe. But what if that student shares a tablet with another student who has an allergic reaction? Then parents--and lawyers--would be demanding to know how the school could have permitted their child to be placed in such peril. In 1996, in the Northern California town of Antioch, a jury awarded $500,000 to a sixth-grader who sued her school for failing to protect her from lewd comments and sexual threats.

“You have administrators asking themselves: ‘If I use good sense, do I put this school--and this budget--in jeopardy?’ ” said Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Assn.

And the threat of litigation goes beyond just the case at hand. “It’s the next time, the precedent that you set,” Bryant said. If an exception is made for one child--say, a kid with a good academic record and an affluent, politically connected family--what happens when a similar infraction is committed by another kid from a more troublesome background? What happens if one of the kids is a girl and the other is a boy? Or if one is white and the other is black?

“One parent’s satisfaction,” Bryant said, “is another parent’s wrath.”

But even when school districts try to be stern, things can still end up a mess. Consider the lessons of the Fairborn School District near Dayton, Ohio, where two middle-school girls were busted in the fall of 1996 for sharing a packet of Midol, a nonprescription pain reliever that is usually taken to ease menstrual cramps.

The 10-day suspensions imposed on Erica Taylor, 13, and Kimberly Smartt, 14, triggered a barrage of national publicity--much of which referred mockingly to the case as “MidolGate.” After nine days, the district agreed to reinstate Erica, who cooperated by attending a drug-and-alcohol counseling program. But when the superintendent decided to add an 80-day expulsion to Kimberly’s sentence--because she had snatched the medicine from the school infirmary and offered it to Erica--her family hit the district with a federal lawsuit on the grounds of racial discrimination.

Kimberly is black; Erica is white, and the Smartt family argued that no other factor could adequately explain the disparity in their punishments. A day after the suit was filed, the school board relented and let Kimberly back in class. She arrived in a limousine. Suddenly, the outrage shifted.

“The girl is being treated like a hero for being a thief,” the president of the Fairborn Education Assn. complained to the Dayton Daily News.

A U.S. District Court judge eventually dismissed Kimberly’s claim of bias, ruling that a school’s need to provide a safe environment outweighed a student’s right to possess even a relatively harmless medication. But the question remained: Did the district overreact in the first place? Or was it cowed at the end?

Erring on the Side of Caution

The answer, for many educators, is to err on the side of caution. “It’s better that we appear too strict,” said the district spokesman in Smyrna, “rather than the other way around.” When the rules are etched in stone, even if they seem overly punitive, there can be no mixed signals as to what a school considers right and wrong. That comforts the good kids, administrators say, as much as it deters the bad.

Foes of zero tolerance contend that the policy does more harm than good, mainly because it ignores the intent of the accused. That is the basis of another legal challenge, being weighed by the Georgia Supreme Court, in which a 15-year-old boy with a history of disciplinary problems was sentenced to juvenile camp for carrying a small X-Acto knife, like the kind used by art students. The boy’s lawyer argued that authorities unfairly equated possession with guilt, given that the blade is not inherently malicious; it all depends on how it is used.

And therein, critics say, lies the real danger of zero tolerance. When educators fail to make distinctions--between a weapon and a tool, or a mind-altering narcotic and an over-the-counter remedy--they run the risk of undermining the very anti-drug and anti-gun message that such policies were designed to communicate. “Zero tolerance is about coming down on kids and taking control away from them,” said Myrna Shure, a psychologist at Allegheny University in Philadelphia. “It teaches them that the world is mean, instead of teaching them to think about what they’re doing.”

For some schools, there may be no choice, given the realities of a modern campus. But for some students, like Cosmo Zinkow, there seems little to gain from a lesson in fear instead of reason.

He and his family can think of many ways that Griffin Middle School might have handled the episode du vin somewhat more constructively. Mrs. Ellingsen could have politely refused the wine--although other students did see her open it--or she could have kept it wrapped until she got home. The principal could have held it in the office and arranged for Cosmo’s parents to present it to her after school hours. Or Bill and Connie Zinkow could simply have been called in for a parent-teacher conference, with a gentle reminder that alcohol is best kept out of the hands of a 13-year-old, regardless of the circumstances.

A big teddy bear of a kid with rosy cheeks and tortoise-shell glasses, Cosmo said the whole experience has left him sour. For one thing, he lost two weeks of school and is worried about keeping up his grades. For another, he smells hypocrisy.

“They told me that wine wasn’t an appropriate gift,” he said. “But nobody ever gave it back.”

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story.