Eleven-Year-Old's Suspension for Butter Knife Exposes Irrational Discipline Once More
According to local reports and the parents, an eleven-year-old honor roll student in Pembroke Pines, Florida, was suspended for six days when she used a children's knife to cut a peach and share it with a classmates. According to the family, the knife was as dull as a butter knife and was part of a set that looked something like this:
The girl's mother said that the knife is safe even for babies: “This is a set of a spoon, fork, and knife [is] for toddlers— one-year-old[s]. It is made for children to learn how to eat properly. She's used it since she was baby.”
With the media attention and the parents pushing back, the school reduced the suspension to three days, but they maintain the initial suspension was valid and it will remain on her record.
Unfortunately, this story is like countless others I describe in Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline. It is yet another example of the intolerability of zero tolerance policies and school officials refusing to consider very basic facts. On their face, the facts reveal 1) no real weapon; 2) no intent to break a rule; 3) no threat or danger to anyone; and 4) everyday benign behavior by a preteen. Based on these facts, it is far from clear that there is any legitimate basis upon which to suspend the student. It would appear that the basis for suspension is nothing more than "those are the rules."
That justification should be absurd enough on its face, but let me make it a bit clearer. Suppose that a school adopted the following rule: "students are prohibited from bringing black ink pens to school." There might be a good reason for the rule, such as the machine that the school uses to grade exams cannot distinguish students' black ink from that of the printed language on handouts. When students use black ink, it throws the whole grading system off. Thus, I would allow that schools could even take away those black ink pens for the day or, to Education Law Prof Blog:
