Family: Teen Suspended After Trying To Do The Right Thing

[The Straight Story]

FOX CHAPEL (KDKA) – A high school student says he is being punished for trying to do the right thing.

He told school officials when he realized he brought his pocketknife to a football game.

But he was suspended anyway.

“I dropped him off right at the corner there by the stop sign,” said David Schaffner, father to the 16-year-old who was suspended.

Schaffner is a proud father, but now also an angry one. He dropped off his son at Fox Chapel Friday night for a football game.

...

“He was cutting branches and what not with it,” Schaffner said. “Just forgot he had it in his pocket.”

There is no metal detector, no bag check there, but Schaffner grabbed a security guard.

“Intentionally, willfully handed the pocket knife,” he said.

He even voluntarily wrote out and signed a statement, saying:

“I was in the woods behind my house at my tree stand and forgot to take my knife out of my pocket … came to the game and gave it to the security guard.”

With that, the Fox Chapel principal kicked him out of the game and then early Monday morning kicked him out of school for 10 days.

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/09/16/suspension-questioned-after-teen-unintentionally-takes-knife-to-football-game/

[sharp_stick]

1. I love zero tolerance school districts.

it makes the schools like such intelligent open places that kids really want to attend.

I'm so glad I'm not an administrator at one of these places, no matter what they do they come out of it looking like idiots.

[Scootaloo]

4. These policies assume children are criminals

Which in turn prepares them for a society that seens teenagers as monsters, and then a police force that sees all other human beings as "the enemy"

Collapse starts at the bottom.

[PeteSelman]

2. Honesty is not always the best policy.

In fact, it seldom is. This was kind of a stupid move by the kid. If he had just kept it in his pocket, no one would have ever known.

Zero tolerance policies are also stupid.

[Politicalboi]

3. He just should have brought his gun

This is ridiculous. Poor kid just should have kept his mouth shut.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Congrats, you just taught the kid

Honesty is not a good thing. That's a hell of a life lesson.

[riqster]

6. "Never, EVER trust someone in a position of authority"

That's the message.

[Go Vols]

22. +1

[leftyohiolib]

7. the teen was suspended for bringing a knife to a place that has a zero tolerance rule

not that i think i t was right i just hate editorialized headlines

[GeorgeGist]

9. So he didn't try to do the right thing?

[leftyohiolib]

10. yes he did but that's not why he was suspended. which is what the title says

[DirkGently]

11. You understand the headline implies he wouldn't have been

punished if he'd decided to just not tell anyone though, right?

Thus it suggests that, ironically, by doing the next best thing to not bringing a knife -- turning it over without having been 'caught' -- he was treated worse than if he had done the less-desirable thing in continuing to carry it.

No problem if you object in general to people making an argument in a headline, but it's not like it's misleading or doesn't follow logically -- "punished for doing the right thing" is pretty clearly the OP's point.

Do you think that's an unfair conclusion to draw?

[joshcryer]

16. It is absolutely why he was suspended.

Had he simply concealed that he had a knife he may not have been caught with it at all. Had he thrown it in the trash (or the woods, or hid it in the stands where no one would've looked), he would've been completely free and clear.

But he did what he felt was the right thing and turned it in to someone in authority.

[rdharma]

8. Tac-Force assisted opening knife

Kind of like a "legal" switchblade. Can be opened with one hand very fast. Has a belt clip for rapid access, and a spike for breaking safety glass windows.

[Gravitycollapse]

17. Why did you post this?

[rdharma]

20. To show you what this kids "pocket knife" looked like.

This is what I think of when I hear "pocket knife".......

But "pocket knife" sounds so much less threatening than an "assisted opening folding knife".

[Gravitycollapse]

23. Interesting, my immediate thought was the kind of pocket knife I carry with me...

Anyway, assisted opening and, arguably, auto-blades, are not particularly better at doing anything compared to something like a axis-lock produced by Benchmade.

I can flick my Benchmade open using one hand in the blink of an eye using nothing but the thumb studs.

[Go Vols]

24. This is what I think of a pocket knife

and I have many.

[snooper2]

30. "Tac-Force Assisted" makes it sound scary doesn't it

LOL

[alp227]

12. "Land of the free and the home of the brave", just a song lyric now?

Zero Tolerance is leading to less tolerance of public schools!

[liberal_at_heart]

13. Yep that's our wonderful public school system. As inflexible as ever.

[hunter]

14. I once brought a rocket to elementery school...

... gave it to a friend, and he lit it off... inside the classroom during a handwriting lesson.

Oh well, I hated handwriting.

We were sent to the office, we were scolded by the principal, our parents were called, and we got lunchtime litter pickup duty for a week.

I don't know what would happen to kids like us today, but I'll bet it would be ugly. They'd probably call the SWAT team or something.

"TERRORISTS LAUNCH MISSILE IN CLASSROOM! SUSPECTS IN CUSTODY! NEWS AT ELEVEN!"

[liberal_at_heart]

18. I sent my kid to school with cough drops today. I'm probably taking a chance on him getting

suspended over it, but I don't care. I've already had it with the schools around here.

[aroach]

19. Happened to me

I put cough drops in my daughter's bag and she got suspended over them. Active ingredient = fruit pectin. Not even a drug but a food product.

[liberal_at_heart]

21. my kid's cough drops had menthol in them. *gasp*. Better watch out. Those kids might be in the

school bathroom making meth out of cough drops.

[Art_from_Ark]

25. If you had done that at my elementary school,

you would have had a date with the "board of education" out in the hall, with everyone in the classroom counting how many "licks" you got.

[Cha]

15. Stupid.. Promotes dishonesty with examples of rewarding their

honesty with being suspended for 10 days.. and having it on your record!

[defacto7]

26. Looks like we have another good one...

that the system wants to take down. The good ones are harder to find these days.

The system is sick. Bad is good. Good is bad. Such logic. So reasonable. So civil. Every child should be taught that blue is green, and red is yellow. Then they will understand.

[Douglas Carpenter]

27. just trying to theorize why we hear about so many crackpot examples of "zero tolerance" policies

gone array? Is this the result of schools not wanting to deal with possible legal liability that they are essentially advised by their legal counsels to either enforce rules with 100% draconian consistency - even when it is completely wacko - Then to refer anything outside of inflexible guidelines to police authorities. That is what I am hearing and reading all the time. Every single little thing is either met with an uncompromising enforcement or it is referred to the police. I'm making a guess that schools - or at least many schools do this in order to sidestep any possible liability. I 'm trying to figure out a reason for all this madness. Could that be it?

[DirkGently]

28. "Zero-tolerance" works politically.

Whenever something horrible happens -- like a kid getting hurt at school -- in the following attempts to ensure "never again," one simplistic but popular suggestion is "zero tolerance."

At its heart I think it's just magical thinking. Punish Tylenol and immunize yourself from heroin overdoses. Come down like a ton of bricks on a plastic cake knife, and somehow it's less likely a knife or a gun will appear.

It's irrational, of course. The kid with a cake knife is not the same kid who's going to bring a pistol or a switchblade, and that kid's not going to get caught by the homeroom teacher anyway if they're really intent on doing harm.

It's the same logic as banning nail files or tiny knives on airplanes. Someone determined to do harm could do worse with a sharpened pencil, but somehow it's imagined that if you block anything remotely resembling a weapon, you're more protected from ... actual weapons.

So we get stupid rules, and punish the wrong kids for the wrong things.

You may be right that there's an element of misguided legal butt covering involved as well. People love to sue a school, and because "zero tolerance" sounds good to people, and requires no critical thinking to apply, a school or county could argue it's "doing everything it can." "Look, we ruined a kid's reputation for giving her friend a Midol, so how can it be our fault if someone else brought a crack pipe?"

Any way we slice it though, it's bad thinking. We DO know the difference between guns and cake knives and aspirin and crystal meth. We CAN differentiate between kids hugging in the hallway and committing rape under the bleachers.

And if we can't, we're in a lot more trouble than that posed by the actual threats we're considering.

[snooper2]

29. 412-963-9600 is the number to call to tell them they are idiots

[Decaffeinated]

31. Another policy that teaches that the rules are something to be avoided....

This is the result of worry wart parents and school boards who talk to their lawyers and say "What can we do?!"

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

32. Ikr! F those institutions of learning!