Tustin Schools’ Zero Tolerance Adds Hypocrisy

Tustin School Board members are squirming. I couldn’t be more pleased.

It’s not that I know them personally or wish them any ill will, but they’ve gotten themselves into a bind over the district’s zero tolerance policy on student drinking. Good for them. I’m trying mightily to remember my childhood admonition against saying, “I told you so!”

All gloating aside, I’ve always disliked zero tolerance. Life sometimes demands wiggle room, and I’ve been biding my time waiting for the right kind of case to prove the point.

Just as this school year was beginning, Tustin got a doozy.

Eight of the top student government leaders at Foothill High School--some of the “best and brightest,” if you will--have admitted to drinking at a countywide student leadership conference in Santa Barbara.

The district considered the conference an outgrowth of a school function, so zero-tolerance came into play.

Tustin’s policy is typical: If a student is caught with drugs or alcohol, he or she is subject to a five-day suspension and an involuntary transfer to another school in the district.

The Foothill students were suspended. A panel of administrators, adhering to the policy, recommended they be transferred. A school district assistant superintendent denied the students’ appeals and upheld the transfers.

The students’ final stop was the board. And, with its own policy staring board members in the eye, they blinked.

They rescinded the transfers, substituting a number of fairly significant sanctions on the students that will prevent them from holding any campus leadership or ceremonial positions. Nor will they be allowed to speak at school assemblies or commencement exercises.

Turns out zero tolerance had a loophole. Citing the policy’s exemptions for “extreme circumstances,” the board let the student leaders stay at Foothill.

Hypocritical? It sure looks that way, especially to some parents whose children had been transferred in the past under the policy. If there were any “extreme circumstances,” it’s interesting that neither the original panel nor the assistant superintendent saw them.

Asked to identify the circumstances, board members would not. Then they told people they shouldn’t question their decision because they didn’t know all the facts.

That pretty much wired things shut.

I join the chorus that charges the board with hypocrisy. Having a policy you don’t enforce is bad, bad, bad.

I also join the chorus that says the board made the right decision in keeping the students at Foothill.

Now, if we could just combine those two choruses into one giant choir that shouts down zero tolerance mentality.

On its face, toughness seems warranted. There’s no good reason to have drugs or alcohol or weapons at school functions. When school administrators around the county (and the country) got hooked on zero tolerance, they no doubt had the “problem” kids in mind. Zero tolerance enabled them to rid the school of such students, without having to worry about the particulars.

But life is about particulars. It’s those particulars that separate one of us from the other. In some situations, the chronic troublemaker should be treated differently from a student body president who’s never been in trouble. No one need apologize for that.

When school officials lament that no one talks about the “good” students who work hard and are successful, presumably these eight are the kind they’re talking about.

What is the logic, then, in banishing them to another school for a single infraction? What kind of policy permits the exiling of your best students?

Zero tolerance is what permits it.

On Monday, the board will review its policy and hear from the public. They’ll catch it from all directions. By adjournment, the members may wish they’d all spent the evening in a sports bar watching Monday Night Football.

Let ‘em sweat. That’s why they get the big bucks.

Their lack of conviction over zero tolerance, which they’ve now demonstrated, should be the springboard to rethink things.

Rather than falling back on zero tolerance to solve problems, maybe the board--and the parents--will confront the real issue:

If the best students in our school are underage drinkers, just how pervasive is the problem?

And what can we do about it?

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to [email protected]