We're all to blame for this girl's arrest

A twelve year old girl was arrested recently for doodling on her desk with a marker.  Arrested.  As in handcuffs and a police station.  For doodling on a desk.

The school had a zero tolerance policy.  The article didn’t say what, exactly, the policy had zero tolerance for.  Graffiti would be my guess.  And writing on a desk is wrong, you know I’m not arguing that a student should be allowed to write on a desk.  But what happened to being asked to write “I will not write on my desk” a thousand times, or an essay?  What happened to a trip to the principal’s office?

We happened, that’s what.  Each of us looking out for our own kids, questioning the judgment of teachers and school staff, questioning how they could possibly even think about punishing our children.

When I was a kid, you listened to your teachers, and if you didn’t, they decided what to do.  And parents backed them up.  If it was bad enough you were sent to the office.  And you were scared.  Maybe you were sent to in-school detention.  If it was really bad, you were suspended (but it had to be bad, like intentionally bad).

But now?  We challenge teachers’ judgment.  We fight for our babies.  We know we can’t afford private school, so we’ve got our sights set on one of the “good” public high schools, and we know our kids won’t have a chance if they’ve got bad stuff on their records, so we fight.  We go to the media, we go to the internet, we sue.  We question the judgment of the teachers and staff.

So the natural result of that is to take judgment out of the equation.  Which is how we’ve ended up with zero tolerance policies.  The only way to keep the teachers and principals from treating one kid better or worse than another is to keep them from using judgment, keep them from looking at a kid’s history and the circumstances and rendering judgment.  No judgment, just hard-and-fast rules.  Your kid draws on a desk?  Call the police.  Your kid holds his thumb and finger like a gun and pretends to shoot a friend on the playground?  Suspension.  Your kindergartner kisses a classmate?  Sexual harassment.  Sorry, nothing we can do, those are the rules.

We need to fight for good teachers and principals, not fight them when we have them.  How about zero tolerance for letting teachers’ ability to judge get thrown aside?

This is an original post to NYC Moms Blog. Amy also blogs about parenting in Brooklyn while keeping herself sane and comfortable at SelfishMom.com.