When We Ban Kids from School, the Damage Goes far Beyond Academics
This post was written with Karen Pittman, CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment, and appeared at www.youthtoday.org.
It's so depressing: Last week brought yet another outrageous tale of zero tolerance gone wild -- this time from Maryland, where a high school suspended a lacrosse player for having a pen knife in his locker.
No, it's beyond depressing. With more and more students being suspended and expelled from their schools for moderate first-time offenses, it's time to get past the debates about fairness: whether a student should be banned from school for possessing a pen knife (he says it was to repair his stick) or a toy gun, or for dyeing her hair too red. What's at stake here is the significant harm that we're wreaking on many of our children.
That's because for many students, being banned from school means more than missing math class. It means being banished from a community.
So when we read about the lacrosse player and the red-haired girl, we think about Nick Stuban -- a high school student in a Washington suburb who committed suicide a few months ago after being