-------(CNN) -- There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, "I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)" scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.
Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.
Alexa's hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and -- the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl -- her classmates. -------
When I read this news story on CNN my first thought was that the world truly is going ever-loving mad. Or more aptly... ever-loving STUPID.
Seriously here - how can anyone start in motion the action that ends with a 12 year old being cuffed and hauled to jail for writing on her school desk. If this ignorance had existed when I was in school my senior photo surely would have been a mug shot!
Why not just give the kid some Ajax and a scrub pad? Really ticked off at her? Let her scrub the whole classrooms desks after school. But don't freaking arrest her!!! The ones who need to be cuffed and hauled off are the administrators and school board who implimented this brainless policy. But I guess there isn't a zero tolerence policy in that district for being an idiot... just for being young and thoughtless. It's bad enough that kids have to defend themselves from bullies their own age. It's just too much when the system becomes the bully.
Things like this are why good teachers are exhausted (check out this blog by one of my favorite bloggers http://sci-teach912.blogspot.com/2010/02/tired.html ). Some are even leaving public schools or teaching altogether. And things like this are why scared parents have started homeschooling or slashing their budgets to afford to put their children in private schools.
-------"There is zero intelligence when you start applying zero tolerance across the board," Clayton County, Georgia, juvenile court judge Steven Teske said. "Stupid and ridiculous things start happening."-------
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