A federal judge in Louisiana this week heard oral arguments in the latest phase of cases showing again how public school establishments can be perniciously bonkers.
The Jefferson Parish School Board continues to stand firm, lacking both logic and decency, against the combined forces of the Louisiana Legislature, the state attorney general, state newspapers, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association, and just about every other sentient being. The board insists that COVID-related “distance learning” gives it the responsibility to enforce “zero tolerance” policies even within private homes, based on whatever a “virtual-lesson” camera might show within its field of vision.
By the board’s logic, if a student sets up his computer at a kitchen table and his mother left a butter knife on the counter, or if there’s a wine rack on the wall, or a prescription drug bottle on the shelf, the child should be harshly punished for having a banned object (weapon, alcohol, drugs) on what amounts to school grounds — because, well, dontcha understand? The computer camera turns a home into the equivalent of school property. Or something.
The current cases revolve around two instances of children recommended for expulsion, and eventually suspended for several days, because BB guns appeared within camera-shot of them while distance-learning. In the more widely reported case, 9-year-old Ka’Mauri Harrison’s little brother took a break from his online schooling last September, entered Ka’Mauri’s room, and accidentally knocked the “weapon” from its resting place. Ka’mauri thoughtfully moved the BB gun out of his brother’s reach, but he happened to place it where a portion was visible on screen. For that act of responsible behavior, young Harrison was penalized and then denied an appeal until the state Legislature quickly and unanimously passed a bill clarifying that, yes, parents do have the right to appeal such disciplinary actions.
Almost the entire Louisiana news media have followed the case closely, with the local Advocate newspapers editorializing that the school board had created a “tawdry mess” that it should “clean up” by “remov[ing] the suspension from Ka’Mauri Harrison’s record.”
Even before the pandemic, school “zero tolerance” policies usually made zero sense. Stories for decades have told of school crossing guards fired for saying the N-word while explaining to children why not to use it, or of a student expelled because he parked his truck in the school lot without knowing that a small kitchen knife from his grandmother’s thrift shop donations had fallen into the truck bed. When those asinine policies are now imposed on private homes, too, both logic and the Constitution cry out to heaven.
“It’s absurd,” Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill told me. “The school board views [the computer lens] as an extension of school property — but, well, they aren’t paying anybody’s mortgage!”
Murrill said Harrison is “a super-great kid” and that his disciplinary hearing was “a farce, a pretense of a hearing; it was a little kangaroo court.”
Rarely does the ACLU side with the NRA and with conservative Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, but here the civil liberties group joined their side by filing a 26-page amicus brief in support of young Harrison. “Attaching such severe consequences to a minor’s misbehavior is antithetical to the foundational role of public education in ‘preparing’ students and ‘helping’ [them] adjust normally to [their] environment,” said the brief, with internal quotes from the famous Supreme Court school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education.
The Jefferson Parish School Board deserves to lose this case and overwhelmingly. The broader lesson, though, should go national: The only proper response to “zero tolerance” policies is for lawmakers and the public to show such rules absolutely zero tolerance.
