Dave Chandler

Criminalizing Kids in Colorado

UPDATE!
Bill Johnson has more today, Saturday, October 27, on how our public school system is using the courts to turn children acting childish into criminals.

Link: It's a Crime What Courts Do to Kids Just Being Kids | Bill Johnson/Rocky Mountain News

You want your jaw to drop into your lap, your eyes to well up? You should take a peek at my e-mail inbox or listen to the voice mail that arrived on Friday.

There was Sheldon Page, who hadn't slept the night before and picked up the paper the moment they threw it on his doorstep. He read in this space on Friday of the elementary school boy now facing criminal charges for allegedly slapping a female classmate on the buttocks. He called.

His 14-year-old grandson was due in court Friday afternoon for sentencing. His anguish had kept him awake. A 13-year-old girl had told her mother the boy touched her bottom during a game of tag in May.

The boy ultimately pleaded guilty to sexual assault and was placed in a juvenile facility Tuesday.

"It is the most outrageous thing I've ever heard of," Sheldon Page, 51, said. "He is a kid, a teenager playing a kid's game, and now they've made him a criminal." ... MORE

---

Commentary: People without school-age children in Colorado might be surprised that there is a permanent police presence in most middle and high schools. At least that has been my observation of the schools in north Jefferson County where I have had contact with public education.

When you read the article by Bill Johnson in today's Rocky Mountain News, you begin to understand how silly juvenile behavior so easily gets criminalized -- the police are there, their presence has to be justified to the taxpayer -- so, kids are put into the criminal justice system for what is basically bad teenage behavior. Shifting certain children into the legal system also makes those kids somebody else's problem instead of the school's problem.

There was a time when teachers, principals and administrators treated children as children. But the enduring paranoia of 'Columbine' has taken childishness away from children ... now every doodle, every journal entry, every prank, every game is seen as a potential psychological portent of a psychotic student.

In truth, the story below as conveyed by Johnson, is yet another example of a failing public education system -- they cannot handle the task the taxpayers have given them: to educate our children. So political and so afraid is the educational establishment that all they can do is test to the point that testing IS the teaching -- and suspension, expulsion and arrest is their 21st century 'modern' way of disciplining.

FAILURE ... that's what it is.

Smaller schools, less testing, local control, ending state and federal curriculum mandates, fewer administrators, police out of the buildings ... these are just a few of the things that could be done to restore schools as places of learning.

But as long as people keep voting taxes to keep the current system in place, nothing will change.

Link: When Did Kids Being Kids Become a Criminal Act? | Bill Johnson/Rocky Mountain News

He is 13 years old.

Thirteen.

And today, he is smack in the middle of the criminal justice system. My guess is that the system will now try to hang a sexual assault label on him, dooming him to a lifetime of misery.

What did he do a deserve this? Happened a couple of weeks ago. I thought you might ask.

He is an eighth-grader at Park Hill Elementary School and, by accounts, a good kid, a decent student and a very good athlete.

From accounts, too - information comes at a trickle when it involves an alleged juvenile crime - the kids at Park Hill for some time have been engaged in a game of their own invention.

It involves, it seems, a weird version of tag: The girls would slap the boys in the, well, privates. The boys, in response, would then slap the girls on the buttocks.

The boy in this story, whose first name I will not use here, apparently was struck while he stood with a girl at the blackboard during the last class of the day.

According to the boy's mother, Molley Warren, it appears that no one ever actually saw her son slap the girl's backside in return. What was seen, she said, was a chalk handprint on the back of the girl's pants. ... Read More

More 'Zero Tolerance' Inanity

Here is yet another report of 'zero tolerance' turning school administrators into nincompoops.

The other foolish party in the story below are the parents who called the school and complained about Kyle Walker's drawing. It is really happening in America, just like in Stalinist Russia, even a seven-year-old child can be turned into the government for thought crimes.

What strikes me is just how unfair and inconsiderate this 'zero tolerance' for drawings or talk about violence is to young school-goers. Our culture is saturated with images of violence. From photos of civil War soldiers in school history text books, to the kicking and punching in cartoons, to the programs mom and dad watch on television, violence is pervasive in America. But the kids are supposed to turn it all off, act like it doesn't exist, erase it from their consciousness -- once they have any contact with the school system ... or else.

Make no mistake about it, I think there is way too much acceptance of violence in this country, we glorify the death and destruction caused by the U.S. military and we passively accept the blood and gore our children enjoy when playing video games. In between is a full landscape of violence that goes far beyond what I witnessed from entertainment in the 1960s and 70s while growing up. Certainly, we need some cultural evolution to more peaceful pictures. However, to place the burden of social change on school children is wrong and mean-spirited.

If parents and school administrators want children not to be so influenced by violence, then they need to take on the entertainment industry. Parents could not buy violent video games or music or watch shoot 'em televsion programs or movies; administrators could encourage boycotts of corporations that purvey excessive violence in their products.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not some kind of pacifistic airhead -- I grew up watching 'Combat!' and played at killing hundreds of Nazis when I was in grade school ... and look at me now. I think there are degrees of violence that are appropriate and inappropriate for people of all ages. I do think the explicitness and gratuitousness conveyed in entertainment violence these days has crossed several lines of decency.

But I also think that it is the responsibility of adults to effect change in this culture, not the superficial nonsense like all these 'zero tolerance' rules and/or legislating 'though crimes' ... but using our power as consumers to let the multi-national entertainment corporations understand that we're not buying their blood and guts anymore.

Let the kids be kids, that means that they shouldn't become surrogates for adult frustration and weakness to take on the real villians. As the incident reported below indicates, however, that is what is actually going on: punish the children, but let MicroSoft, Fox TV and the Pentagon keep those images of death and destruction on every video screen in the land.

Link: Second-Grader Kyle Walker Suspended For Drawing a Gun | Emil Steiner/Offbeat/Washington Post

Residents of Dennis, N.J., can sleep better knowing that second-grader Kyle Walker was kept out of school last Thursday. While on the school bus, the seven-year-old reportedly drew a picture of a person pointing a pistol, which he then gave to a fellow passenger. When that child's parents saw the offending image, they called school officials and swift action was taken.

Kyle's mother, Shirley McDevitt, says they overreacted by suspending her son for a day. Moreover, she wants it removed from his permanent record. She told the local paper that "when a child draws at that age, they're not drawing with thought." Her son, she said, "cried the night he was suspended ... because he thought he was going to miss a school field trip."

The drawing itself appears to be a stick figure rendering in pencil with one figure "shooting another stick figure." More disturbing, however, is that the armed figure has a "smiley face" and the name "me" written above it. The stick figure victim is also smiling -- eerily, with the name of the classmate (David) to whom he bequeathed his sketch.

Conceivably, then, this innocent drawing is actually an artful death threat.

Kyle claimed that the image was of a water pistol and not a real gun, but as the district noted, that's no excuse. After all, today's water pistols could be tomorrow's water balloons -- or even water cannons. And there are precedents for his punishment, such as a 2000 suspension of kindergarteners who used their hands as guns while playing cops and robbers.

The question is, does his punishment go far enough? While some parents and civil libertarians may not agree, the safety of our children mandates living up to our zero-tolerance policies -- not 0.2-tolerance or 0.1-tolerance, but 0.0-tolerance. Rules are rules, and that means suspending children for pretending to have guns, talking about guns or drawing guns. In fact, if it were possible, why not punish our second-graders for thinking about guns? By monitoring and correcting those who's mind's stray into inappropriate areas we not only ensure a safe and fair learning environment, but a better future for America.

Take Back Our Schools, Colorado!

Here's an action plan for restoring the Halloween party to kids at the Broomfield, Colorado, Kohl Elementary School -- No Halloween Party; No CSAP Test.

Parents and taxpayers have little control over the public schools they fund -- that is what is signified by the unilateral, authoritarian decree from the Kohl Elementary School principal banning the traditional Halloween party.

The people of Colorado and all of the American people want our children to get a good education, the American people also believe in local control ... but what we have seen in education is an increasing trend towards top-down authority. The worst offender in recent times is the Bush 'No Child Left Behind' legislation; the central government in Washington, D.C. now mandates all kinds of requirements on local schools. Likewise, a new group 'ED in '08', with former Colorado governor Roy Romer as its mouthpiece, also is pushing for further 'nationalization' of education.

Of course, the further from your local school board the decision-making process gets, the less influence and control parents have over the education of their own children. It certainly seems that these days more control over teaching and learning comes from the state and national capitals than it does from your neighbor on the school board. We may have wanted more accountablility for the tax dollars levied for educational purposes, but I don't think most parents ever envisioned the monster that mandated, standardized testing, like CSAP, has become.

The testing now goes on for weeks and weeks, hour after hour ... the test preparation (teaching to the test) now begins almost from the first day of school. At parent-teachers conferences last evening I heard teachers tell me the "curriculum is now CSAP-driven" and that test preparation worksheets for the students will begin in just a couple of weeks. In other words, the testing has become an end unto itself -- yet we all know that testing is not teaching, it is a tool for measuring learning, that's all.

Of course, CSAP is also high stakes testing because money and resources are all tied to the results. Money. The one thing polticians, school administrators and principals understand -- MONEY. Indeed, listening to the 'educrats' one would believe that funding, testing and education are synonymous terms, one word interchangable with another. Hundreds of millions of tax dollars are funnelled into the educational bureaucracy every year ... and it is surprisingly never enough. Furthermore, if you question the amount of money allocated to education, you are chided and derided as not caring for the children.

I maintain that there are some things money cannot solve -- and genuine educational reform will not come from just raising and spending more money. My primary solution to our educational woes is increased local control of schools -- repeal almost all of the curriculum mandates from state and federal legislatures and bureacracies and let local school boards decide how best to teach the children in their own communities. Big government should ensure equalized funding, so that all kids have access to the same level of resources -- but no strings attached, let the school board members be accountable to the folks who elected them.

In that spirit, here is my suggestion for a symbolic demonstration of resolve to take our schools back from educational theorists and 'educrat' administrators, especially in the Kohl Elementary situation -- no Halloween party, no CSAP test.

What!!!

Would you jeopardize funding for the elementary school just because a principal is so arrogant that she cancels Halloween? Well, remember that adage about smacking the mule with a two-by-four to get its attention? That's the tactic I'm proposing. A student not taking the CSAP gives the school a 'zero' score -- that's tough and a CSAP boycott will consequently get quick attention.

I think this banning of Halloween is emblematic of some pretty serious problems becoming prevalent in our schools, much of which I just discussed above. So, yes, I think parents need to take a bold step to get the attention of the principals and administrators who view parents and children as statistical playthings for their testing and funding schemes.

This Halloween party controversy is about creating an environment of joy in the school and the community; it is about letting students know that learning is ultimately fun and satisfying. Indeed, with the CSAP regimen, an activity like the Halloween party is more important than ever.

It has to start somewhere -- perhaps this is the time and place.

So, parents, print out the letter below, sign it and turn it in to the principal now ... it might help restore an American tradition to your school. If that works and you still then want to have your child take the CSAP in the spring, you've got plenty of time to change your mind.

Here is the 'opt out' of CSAP letter composed by The Coalition for Better Education (a web site that can also provide you with more information about the flawed CSAP test).

Download Opt-out-letter-CSAP.pdf

Freedom of Speech in Denver ... for Columbus Day

In Denver, Colorado, every year at this time, we have a battle over free speech -- and it's allegedly all about Columbus.

The fight comes from a small loony fringe group trying to silence the free speech rights of an organization of Italian-Americans. This radical cadre has proclaimed the case against Christopher Columbus closed -- any dissent from their ideological certitude is labeled 'racist'. Most Americans would certainly not agree, even if they are open, as am I, to more discussion and persuasion.

The right to protest is enshrined in the First Amendment to our Constitution, it is a fundamental ingredient of freedom. Consequently however, making vows that the free speech and free assembly rights of other folks "... is going to die here" and that the "time for talk is over" as declared by 'Transform Columbus Day' orgainzer Glenn Spagnuolo is intolerant, disrespectful and, in fact, is everything that Spagnuolo himself maintains that he is against.

I have never completely understood what the tactic of stopping the parade is supposed to accomplish. While the "Four Directions; All Nations March" that takes place Friday evening is meant to send a positive message, shutting down the parade only makes that message appear radical and extremist.

My suggestion is that those wishing to promote an 'Indegenous Peoples' celebration do just that. Let the Italian-Americans exercise their free speech rights. If the tide of public opinion changes, then the traditional Columbus Day commemorations will eventually disappear.

Peace, tolerance and dialogue are vastly preferable to invective and veiled threats of violence.

From the Dhammpada:

"Look how he abused me and beat me,
How he threw me down and robbed me."
Live with such thoughts and you live in hate.

"Look how he abused me and beat me,
How he threw me down and robbed me."
Abandon such thoughts, and live in love.

Columbus Day Parade Denver

Transform Columbus Day Alliance

Link: 83 Protesters Arrested at Columbus Day Parade | Rocky Mountain News

Protesters blocked the Columbus Day Parade route in Denver Saturday and poured a bucket filled with fake blood and dismembered baby dolls onto the street as police arrested 83 people, including American Indian Movement activist Russell Means.

At least 10 of those arrested face resisting arrest charges, while most face charges of blocking a parade route and/or interfering with a peaceful assembly, Denver Police spokesman Sonny Jackson said. The parade through downtown Denver was delayed about an hour.

George Vendegnia, one of the organizers of the parade, said the protest and delay was planned for and caused minimal disruption.

"With this protest, it's just motivating people more to be back next year and exercise their right to participate in an American holiday," Vendegnia said.

No serious injuries were reported to either protesters or police.

Educrats Versus Children

The principal at Kohl Elementary School in Broomfield, Colorado, is very confused ... and she is hurting children.

If this principal had her way, school would be a soulless place ... very safe ... but lifeless. When we heard principal Cindy Kaier on the radio Wednesday, she talked a lot about working to make all things 'equitable' at the school. But her job is to educate children, not engage in social experiments; her duty is to impart the joy of learning so that young people are eager to be educated, not be the moral arbitor of American culture at Kohl.

The effect of this episode will be to instill cynicism towards the school system in children, their parents and the general public. Even if this principal had a brief delusional notion that banning Halloween was somehow good for the kids, the reality that has erupted as a consequences of her decree proves her error.

Ultimately, this incident and many of the others that I have posted on the site in the past, reveal that administrators and principals have lost sight of or control over their real jobs -- educating children. Much of this is because politicians at the federal and state levels of government have placed so many mandates and requirements on the schools that administrators are forced into becoming soulless bureaucrats. On the other hand, we have not witnessed many administrators and principals or local school boards saying "enough is enough" and standing up and telling the politicians to stop telling them what to do.

We need some profound changes in our public education system in this country. If the personnel in the schools do not start this demand for reform, then the demise of our once vaunted public schools will be easily predicted.

The following excerpts and links to two columnists from both of our local metro newspapers are right on the mark regarding the Halloween controversy.

Link: Not Even Halloween is Sacred These Days | David Harzanyi/Denver Post

The two most devastating words any red-blooded American kid is likely to hear are "Fall Festival."

It can mean only one thing: The War on Halloween is once again upon us.

No, the War on Halloween won't induce the same zealous indignation that, say, the War on Christmas can. For me, though, it's far worse.

We're still weeks from this glorious pagan celebration, but you can already hear the sound of the pinheads sucking the fun out of life.

Recently, Halloween celebrations were banned at Kohl Elementary School in Westminster. The story garnered national attention after the principal sent home a newsletter alerting parents that their children's yearly Halloween party would be replaced by a - gulp - fall celebration.

Costumes? Forget it.

On the heels of a Colorado Springs- area school banning tag (so much for Western free spirit), it seems political correctness is engulfing common sense at an accelerated pace around here - not to mention demonizing an already perfectly demonic holiday.

Why can't kids celebrate this spooky orgy of fun? Well, as one fourth-grade Kohl teacher puts it - and I paraphrase here - if even one child feels left out because of Halloween, we've all failed.

So you see, it's all about inclusion. Funny, barring 99 percent of a school from celebrating a holiday sounds a lot like a massive exclusion to me. Which is to say that the practice is about as nefarious as ghoulish adults handing out healthy raisins instead of Kit Kats to trick-or-treaters. There is just no call for it. ... MORE

Link: Ban on Hugs is Among Latest Ways to Put Squeeze on Kids | Bill Jhonson/Rocky Mountain News

I would not pay five pennies to be a kid again. Even the devil has to know this now, certain that I would be the last person to answer his call.

Ah, but in a different time, the prospect would have been quite appealing.

Outside of the cluelessness and puberty thing, you see, a kid has no car or mortgage payments, no palms-out-begging children, no ex-wives. As a kid now, I might actually know how to work a video game controller and use a computer as something more than a glorified typewriter.

Yet being a kid today more and more means getting turned into an emotionless automaton, being told just to fit in.

Maybe you have not read the newspapers lately.

And I refer not only to this week's ban on classroom Halloween costumes and parties in one Broomfield school.

The most outrageous of the DON'T-DO-THAT trend happened last week. In Oak Park, Ill., a middle school principal outlawed hugging, of all things. ...

... It is the same with Halloween parties, which in Broomfield and elsewhere now follow Christmas parties as being labeled generically as "holiday" parties.

It is impossible, I think these days, to satisfy anyone - much less everyone.

This is what I wanted to tell Cindy Kaier, principal of Kohl Elementary School in Broomfield, who last week made news by sending home a letter to parents informing them that the traditional classroom Halloween parties this year are being replaced by something called a "fall party."

And since it is focused on fall - whatever that means - kids can't wear costumes to school, Cindy Kaier ruled. ...

... Cindy Kaier's decision was in response to the small percentage of kids like I was, those whose parents cannot afford costumes. She also was accommodating parents who do not allow their children to celebrate Halloween.

For good or bad, this is 2007 America.

I hate it. Not for lack of sympathy and understanding for the percentage-wise few, but out of disgust that everything that once was the hallmark of being a child is being stripped away the second even one parent complains. ...

... They dispatched me to Briggs Gamblin, a spokesman for Boulder Valley Schools.

"Such decisions are made on a school- by-school basis," he said, clearly uncomfortable with having to defend a decision he had no part in making.

Cindy Kaier, he said, is a highly regarded educator, who was acting only in the best interests of the school, her teachers and students.

"This wasn't a district edict," he said. "The principal runs the school and felt she needed to do this. We fully support her."

I get it, I told him, yet is there a line? Are we soon to outlaw ponytails because some girls can't grow one?

"In the principal's view," Briggs Gamblin said, "the Halloween parties became disruptive."

By that measure, we should outlaw voting. Nothing in America in recent years has become more nasty and divisive than that.

"No," he said, "the last thing anyone wants to do is take anything away from the kids. No one wants to take the fun out of school for them. But at the end of the day, each principal has to make a decision for their school."

Cindy Kaier has been principal at Kohl for six years, and is said to have the strong support of her parents. Some don't agree with her on this, Briggs Gamblin said. She simply did what she felt was right.

"At the district level, you have to trust the principal," he said. "That's what it comes down to."

Ask me, what it comes down to is that this is no time to be a kid.

Boo-Hoo at Broomfield School

A big boo-hiss to the principal of Kohl Elementary School in Broomfield, Colorado. She's banning Halloween.

Halloween, as it is currently celebrated in the United States, is purely secular ... its pagan religious roots were buried in an avalanche of consumerism many, many years ago. The holiday, however, is one of the most popular of the year ... my own children have said that it is their second favorite holiday, after Christmas, of course.

Yet, right here in the metro area we witness yet another school administrator who has become a control-freak. The consequences of this power-trip will be to make Kohl Elementary less joyful, more somber, a place of incessant testing and fear of just about everything.

I've also included in this post a link and excerpts from a report in a similar vein about a school in the Chicago area that has banned hugging. Yup. "Rampant hugging" at Oak Park's Percy Julian Middle School has caused the principal there to issue a 'zero tolerance' decree to stop this suddenly unacceptable behavior. Maybe talking, smiling and all social interactions among young people should be prohibited ...

You have to wonder what is going on ... are school administrators so successful in getting our children educated that they have plenty of time to issue rules and decrees controlling every aspect of a student's daily rountine? Or have high-stakes standardized testing, countless politically motivated curriculum mandates from state and federal governments, and the 'Columbine syndrome' turned administrators and principals into, well, bureaucratic zombies?

The Kohl Elementary School principal needs to back-off this no-Halloween edict ... we want kids to want to come to school, right?

Addendum: I heard part of an interview with this Kohl Elementary School principal on a local radio program this morning. Listening to Principal Cindy Kaier would make any normal person retch -- politically correct drivel, educrat-ese jargon, and a smug "we know best" attitude oozed out of this woman's mouth -- this is precisely why public confidence in public education is deteriorating. How teachers who genuinely want to teach and instill the joy of learning in children can stand to work for a self-approving functionary like this is beyond my understanding.

By the way, here is the link to the Kohl Elementary School Web site ... there you can find contact information.

Link: Halloween Party Dumped at School in Broomfield | Rocky Mountain News

There won't be little ghosts and goblins at Kohl Elementary School this Halloween.

In a newsletter sent home to parents, Principal Cindy Kaier wrote that the traditional Halloween party celebrated in classrooms each year will be replaced by a fall party on Friday.

And because the party is focused on fall, not Halloween, children can't wear costumes.

Parents expressed frustration that they weren't included in the decision.

Brook Kimber said it's hard to explain a random Oct. 5 party to a child.

The decision came after a discussion that culminated in an "emotional" meeting with teachers that focused on school holiday parties and how Kohl could continue to celebrate without leaving out anyone.

Link: Halloween Costumes Ruled Out at Broomfield's Kohl Elementary This Year | Boulder Daily Camera

Link: School Bans Hugging | cbs2chicago.com

Schools just say no to bullying and fighting, but hugging? ...

... "Last year we would see maybe as many as 10 students on one side (of the hallway), 10 on the other and then, going in opposite directions, would sort of have a hug line going on and you could see where that would be a problem," said Victoria Sharts, principal of Oak Park's Percy Julian Middle School.

So this year Sharts decided to draw the line on hug lines by banning all hugging among students within the building.

Sharts said, "Hugging is really more appropriate for airports or for family reunions than passing and seeing each other every few minutes in the halls."

When teachers started enforcing the new policy last month all hallways and classrooms in the 860-student school became hug-free zones.

When our cameras rolling during passing period today there was no hugging to be seen.

Sixth grader Isabella Miller disagrees with the crackdown. "I don't think that that's right"

Her father agrees with her.

"It seems like a crazy idea to me," Mark Miller said.

The principal says the rampant hugging is creating bottle necks in the hallway and making kids late for class. Furthermore she says although hugs are supposed to be handshakes from the heart some times they don't seem so innocent. ...

... Sharts said the hug ban is just one element of a comprehensive discipline and anti-bullying plan. High-fiving in the hallways is also frowned upon.

Tolerance and Non-Violence for Columbus Day

The rhetoric and tenor of the language from those who declare they will disrupt the Denver Columbus Day Parade is discouraging.

Notwithstanding Glenn Morris's claim that his group will use non-violent means to accomplish its purpose, the rest of the statements reported in our two metro newspapers indicate another inclination.

I have always found this particular faction's arguments against Columbus Day to be intellectually disingenuous -- their public utterances have tended towards belligerence and bigotry towards people who happen to disagree with them.

The common struggles and joys we all face in today's world should lead us to discourse and action for greater understanding and tranquility. What the parade 'disrupters' are saying, as reported in the two newspaper links below, is divisive and small-minded.

I encourage progressives to find a more peaceful and respectful way to express their concerns about the status of Native Americans in our nation today.

Link: Columbus Day Collision Course | Rocky Mountain News

... Glenn Spagnuolo, representing PITCH - Progressive Italians Transforming the Columbus Holiday, said Italians from Italy would be flying in to join the protest. "The parade you are going to see has nothing to do with Italian culture," he said.

When asked if he and others had obtained permits for their demonstration, Spagnuolo said, "We don't need a permit, because we are on native land."

Link: Protesters Vow to Stop Columbus Day Parade | Denver Post

On the 100th anniversary of the Columbus Day Parade through downtown Denver this Saturday, American Indian protesters are planning to stop the parade in its tracks.

"The leaders in last year's parade were people dressed up as members of the Third Cavalry. That was the unit who fought in the Sand Creek Massacre. It has nothing to do with Italian heritage," said Glenn Spagnuolo, one of the protest organizers who spoke at a rally this morning at Denver's City and County Building. He referred to the bloody 1864 Sand Creek raid by Colorado militiamen, in which 160 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians — mostly women and children — were slaughtered.

"The symbolism of those marchers was very clear — racism and hate. It was the same message as the three nooses in Jena, Louisiana," he said.

Spagnuolo, who is of Italian heritage, and Glenn Morris, an organizer and an American Indian, said they have invited a large number of sympathizers to help disrupt Saturday's parade.

"There will be a large action Saturday morning to confront this parade," Spagnuolo said. "This holiday is going to die here. The time for talk is over."

Morris clarified that his group Saturday "will use every nonviolent, constitutionally protected" means of opposing the marchers.

Especially for Colorado School Adminstrators

Thirteen thousand suspensions from Colorado schools during 2004-2005 is a sign of the disfunctional consequences of the 'zero tolerance' mentality. Students not in school are not learning, academically or how to behave in a socially responsible manner.

That number of suspensions is also an indicator of failure ... it says that adminstrators and principals do not know how to interact with compassion, fairness and common sense with even minor student transgressions. Unfortunately, it is just a part of this mindless 'zero tolerance' philosophy that has permeated so much of American life.

The following excerpt from an article that appeared in yesterday's San Francisco newspaper explains very well the problems with 'zero tolerance'.

Of course, when it comes to schools, there is a better way than kicking kids out of the school building for every 'zero tolerance' infraction -- read this 9News report to see an example -- here.

I hope that school administrators (and school boards) thoughout Colorado start moving away from the 'zero tolerance' theory that turns good people who make simple mistakes into 'bad' people.

Link: Zero Tolerance - It's the American Way | Richard Rapaport/San Francisco Chronicle

Does it feel like nobody listens anymore? That everyone is tuned into their own channel? That people in your daily life are working from some secret script designed to degrade and disenfranchise you? Welcome to ZT America.

ZT, or Zero Tolerance, is the mind-set and rationale used these days to justify actions ranging from the expulsion of elementary school students for bringing alcohol-based mouthwash to school, to the sentencing of a Virginia mother to two years in prison for serving beer to her 16-year-old son and his classmates at a party.

Zero Tolerance has been invoked against a kaleidoscope of recent allegedly anti-social behaviors: Republican colleagues of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig clawed each other raw to declare Zero Tolerance for his alleged misdeeds in the men's room at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Zero Tolerance was on the faces of University of Florida police as they Tasered student Andrew Meyer during a speech by John Kerry. Meyer's imbecilic behavior, in fact, illustrated his own Zero Tolerance for the time and opinions of others.

ZT is in the American political bloodstream. After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush declared Zero Tolerance for looters. Trying to defuse the crisis in California prisons, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounced Zero Tolerance for "gang-related codes of silence." Mothers Against Drunk Driving avows to-the-death Zero Tolerance for underage drinking. The Defense Department proclaims ZT for sexual harassment.

Zero Tolerance has become a featured player in the American judicial pageant. Its tenets justify draconian overcharging and Methuselah-like jail terms. Zero Tolerance has helped transform American justice into an incarceration machine largely free from human interference or humane inference. ZT justice absolves officials from accusations of weakness on crime, while jailing people in record numbers. According to a recent Justice Department report, the United States now has the world's largest prison population and highest rate of incarceration, with 1 in 32 American adults enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

Like water hyacinth, the pestiferous houseplant invading Southern lakes and streams, Zero Tolerance is taking over the national fishpond, choking out once-treasured values like compassion, discretion and inventiveness. Over the past four decades, Zero Tolerance has metastasized from drug enforcement, to policing, into the court system, the public schools and now, perhaps worst of all, into the American social mainstream. ...

... Nor does it take a genius to explain why Zero Tolerance is transforming America into "The Land Mercy Forgot." Zero Tolerance is, after all, the logical and syntactical equivalent of Total Intolerance. How unfortunate that there was no warning that we toiled under a system that has sanctioned total intolerance across the breadth of national life.

Originally culled from the engineering lexicon, Zero Tolerance first saw light in 1971, a PR slogan promulgated by New York public health officials who failed to detect tainted baby food in an upstate processing plant. In 1973, as Watergate's noose tightened, Nixon Justice Department officials appropriated Zero Tolerance as a tough-on-crime anodyne. In the early 1980s, the Navy adopted Zero Tolerance to add puissance to a purge of seagoing potheads. From there, it entered civilian drug enforcement and then spilled over into the general justice system, prospering as that ZT subspecies, Zero Tolerance for Crime, periodically trotted out to induce voters into backing law-and-order candidates.

In ZT America, God save the judge finding redemptive qualities in law-breakers. Creampuff sentencing is the Zero Tolerance equivalent of the scarlet "S," for Soft on Crime. Today, "victim's rights" organizations are twitching to replace "activist judges" with those favoring sentences that would have made Saddam Hussein blush. Having created a courtroom forum for victims and families, television now brings us a daily parade of the unmerciful, tasteless and overwrought, without seemingly a thought to the fading of John Adams' epochal instruction for "a nation of laws and not of men."

Discretion, once a tool of intelligent policing, has given way to drawn guns, takedowns and automatic arrest. Does anyone remember a time when a local cop might simply drive a tipsy taxpayer home? Not if MADD has anything to say about it. Zero Tolerance enforcement also sponsors a growing culture of entrapment that encourages the setups and stings that vacuum into the already full-to-bursting criminal justice system not the truly dangerous, but rather the merely stupid and weak.

The unhappiest consequence of Zero Tolerance, however, may be the rise of Generation ZT, children born beginning in the Reagan/Bush '80s, now the sacrificial lambs of Zero Tolerance and, paradoxically, as they have entered the workforce, its most loyal servants.

For these children of ZT, physiology is destiny: They are pudgy, raised indoors during the '90s Polly Klaas child-snatching hysteria. They are myopic, recipients of too much homework assigned too early. They walk hunched, from bulging book bags hefted after administrators sealed school lockers as potential drug magazines. Forbidden to explore local woods and instead accessories to parent-supervised play dates, they have little taste for solitude.

They are, however, anything but stupid. Beset on all sides, Generation ZT learned that a jesting lunchroom threat, a comb that looks like a switchblade, or a stick of caffeinated Jolt gum offered to a classmate could terminate Ivy League aspirations.

How much easier, then, to stifle the impulse to toilet-paper the assistant principal's car, or challenge the history teacher's lame Civil War interpretation. These days, however, any perceived act of resistance might bring the local police SWAT team charging through school's corridors. How much more practical to play it sly, pass through class without being the stuck-out nail pounded in by the hammer of Zero Tolerance. Yet, how sad to trim youthful sails to the winds of ZT at the age when gaudy mistakes are best made, the status quo mocked and hell generally raised.

Generation ZT has done few of those things. Having learned to love the subjugating rules required for success in the un-brave new world of Zero Tolerance, you can bet that their ascension up the American socio-economic ladder will mean an increasingly intolerant ZT eye cast on the often-unruly lives of the rest of us.