TRI In The News

Schools Embraced Zero-Tolerance Policies After Columbine. Have They worked?

From DenverPost.com
Original article available here.

When he stuffed his fist into the lollipop jar on his teacher's desk, David Boeke didn't know about what grown-ups call zero tolerance, and he didn't think he was stealing.

Not that it mattered. For yielding to the call of sticky goodness back in 2000, David's 11-year-old behind was bounced from his Douglas County elementary school.

The punishment didn't end there. He was also charged with theft and prosecuted. With that, the sixth-grader and his parents were pulled into the slipstream of zero-tolerance school policies that kicked into hyperdrive in the post-Columbine era.

In their desire to protect children, policymakers have sampled a wide range of options, many born before Columbine but nurtured in its aftermath: anti-bullying

programs, anonymous tip lines, metal detectors, on-campus police and zero tolerance.
Now, with a decade's worth of hindsight, and funding for virtually every school-safety program in jeopardy, research is teasing out those that do make students and teachers safer from those that don't -- and from those that do little more than defy common sense.

Colorado lawmakers, echoing recent efforts in Utah, Rhode Island and Texas, are tweaking a state zero-tolerance law that mandated expulsion of students even for possessing fake guns.

That's enough to cause some observers to wonder if the pendulum is starting to swing back from the ultravigilant get-tough policies Columbine wrought.

"We are starting to find out what other options are available as research comes out about being overly punitive and overly harsh," said Janelle Krueger, principal safe-schools consultant to the Colorado Department of Education.

"We are seeing a shift where we're coming to understand how important it is to teach the desirable behavior, so kids can live up to that expectation," Krueger said.

But others aren't so sure the fears that led to an 11-year-old being hauled into court for candy theft have really subsided -- or even should subside -- all that much.

There have been overreactions, said Kim Ursetta, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.

Nevertheless, she said, "School safety has to be at the forefront of everything we do."

Preventing the seeds of rage

The dust had barely settled on the nation's bloodiest school shooting when teachers and principals, police, politicians and parents around the country united in vows that never again would there be another Columbine.

That was the easy part.

Figuring out how to make good on that pledge has been a much trickier proposition.

And now, with budgets being decimated across the state and the country, virtually every program adopted in the last 10 years is potentially on the chopping block.

In fact, the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities program that Krueger oversees this year will get less than half the money it got in the year before Columbine.

In 1998, the program got $467,000 in federal funds. This year, it will get $179,786.

In the past decade, the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado has evaluated 600 school-safety programs.

"Of those, there are about 50 that seem as though they actually might work," said Bill Woodward, the center's training director.

Descriptions of those are on the center's website, but by and large they focus not on eleventh-hour police intervention, weapons detection or heavy- handed discipline.

Instead, Woodward said, effective programs strive to prevent the seeds of rage from taking root in a school or a child in the first place.

That is the approach, too, of the statewide School Safety Resource Center, which the legislature created in 2008.

"Our goal is to prevent the need for crisis programs," said center director Linda Kanan.

That approach was also emphasized by the Columbine Review Commission.

After more than a year of study and testimony, the commission's 2001 report advocated that every high school and middle school establish threat-assessment teams and that schools adopt anti-bullying programs and establish systems for sharing information with police, parents and other authorities.

The commission also advised schools to end the "code of silence" that keeps kids from reporting schemes hatching in other students' brains.

One notable program that grew from those recommendations is Safe2Tell.

Safe2Tell is a sort of anonymous crime-stoppers hotline for kids. Since 2004, it has fielded more than 1,450 calls, reporting everything from animal abuse to suicidal classmates.

Just as there is growing agreement about which approaches to school safety work, there is an emerging consensus about what doesn't work.

In the painful weeks and months after Columbine, many school administrators saw metal detectors as an easy lifeline -- and they grabbed them.

Longmont's Skyline High School even rolled out the ominous-sounding WeaponScan 80 for a short- lived tryout in 2001.

But that initial enthusiasm has waned.

"There have not been many recommendations that support metal detectors and hardware," Kanan said.

For one thing, a big portion of school violence happens outside classrooms and corridors. The National School Safety Center found that of 451 school-related violent deaths between 1992 and 2008, 210 happened in parking lots or at bus stops, on football fields or across the street from campuses.

While some school-safety policies slip comfortably into the "effective" or "not effective" columns, that is not the case for what has been the most widely embraced approach: zero tolerance.

Zero tolerance generally means strict rules universally applied, no exceptions, period.

When it comes to blanket bans of weapons and drugs, everybody loves zero tolerance. That is, until someone like honor student Marie Morrow gets kicked out of school.

Then, while the public collectively rolls its eyes, administrators say their hands are tied.

That's pretty much what happened in Morrow's case.

Discretion taken out of schools

Morrow is the Cherokee Trail High School senior who brought three fake rifles, props from her drill team, to school in her car. Cherry Creek schools officials said that by law, they had no choice but to expel her.

Public outrage was loud and nearly unanimous.

So, too, was the vote in the Colorado legislature to change the law.

"I'm one of those who has come to the conclusion that we went a little bit further than we should have," said Sen. Kevin Lundberg, the Berthoud Republican who sponsored the changes.

But some school districts apparently prefer having their hands tied to having discretion in such cases.

Lawmakers report that the only real opposition to the changes came from school districts themselves.

The changes Lundberg authored allow students to have facsimile firearms in their vehicles at school, as long as they don't threaten with them.

"We haven't taken the teeth out of zero-tolerance policies when it comes to truly dangerous weapons, but when it's not a dangerous weapon, there needs to be balance to it," Lundberg said.

Do programs discriminate?

Balance is one thing Padres Unidos -- Spanish for "Parents United" -- was seeking from Denver Public Schools in 2005, when it released findings of a study that showed Latino and African-American kids were getting tossed out of school at a far greater rate and for less serious infractions than white classmates.

In a district where one in four middle-schoolers had been suspended in 2000 -- the highest rate in the state -- the findings got attention.

From that study was born the district's restorative- justice policy, which establishes progressive consequences and gives kids a chance to straighten up and make amends, said Marco Nunez of Padres Unidos.

Most important, Nunez said, the policy aims to keep kids in school, not shove them out. But teachers have serious concerns about the program.

"We do believe restorative justice can be very beneficial," said Ursetta, with the teachers union. "But we also need to make sure we are enforcing policies consistently. We're finding especially in secondary schools there are cases where they aren't being enforced."

For his part, Nunez said, he gets that teachers and administrators want to assure safety.

"I understand zero tolerance comes from the need to take a prudent approach," he said. "But there has to be common sense. There has to be discretion."

Discretion is exactly what zero-tolerance policies lack by design, said John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute.

The Virginia-based institute litigates on behalf of people it believes have had their civil liberties violated.

Whitehead said cases stemming from zero-tolerance policies just keep coming.

"We're so busy, we can't take them all," he said. "They're just legion."

Whitehead fights them because he believes they're illegal but also because he considers them bad social policy.

"There are some really bad downsides besides making school officials look silly," he said. "It's disillusioning; it's a bad education lesson. And it's a bad political lesson, which is they (kids) have no rights."

Most of the time, courts disagree.

"They don't like to mess in school affairs," he said.

Outside the courts, the debate rages on.

Meanwhile, school and state officials have a whole new realm of safety to worry about: cyberbullying and Twittered threats.

1999

The Colorado Trust helped create the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado at Boulder for a six-year initiative called the "Safe Communities -- Safe Schools" program.

2000

The Columbine Review Commission is appointed by Gov. Bill Owens in January. The commission concluded authorities ignored warning signs that could have exposed Eric Harris' and Dylan Klebold's plans. "Apparently there was potential for early detection of Harris and Klebold, and that fell through the cracks," Owens said at the time.

The Colorado legislature passes the Safe Schools Act. The act and later amendments require districts to have a written safe-school plan and discipline codes. They are supposed to have annual safety inspections, have bully-prevention policies and enter into agreements with law enforcement to help maintain a safe school.

2004

The Safe2Tell Reporting Hotline and Awareness Campaign was launched to provide an anonymous way to report concerns of safety, focusing on awareness and early intervention.

2005

The Colorado Trust initiated a three-year, $9 million grant program to fund evidence- and school-based bullying-prevention efforts. Forty-five grantees estimate they reached 50,000 young people in 40 Colorado counties during the 2005-08 project period.

2006

An armed man held six students hostage at Platte Canyon High School and ultimately killed 16-year-old Emily Keyes. The school includes design features incorporated by the architect as a result of Columbine, and authorities said they used lessons from Columbine in their response. "In a couple of significant ways, Columbine may have helped Platte Canyon avoid even a worse tragedy. . . . Perhaps we've learned some lessons from Columbine, and perhaps those children didn't entirely die in vain," Gov. Owens said at the time.