'Zero tolerance' only keeps good people from doing their jobs

Zero tolerance.

It's getting so you have to be pretty old to remember a time in this country when there were rules and the people running things had the discretion of how to enforce them.

I don't remember exactly when the concept of zero tolerance got started, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there wasn't a tie-in with attorneys being allowed to advertise their services.

That happened in 1977. And once they were allowed to run ads on radio and television and start putting huge billboards along the highways, Americans became the most litigious people in the world.

All of a sudden, lawyers were telling people that if anything bad happened to them, they could sue someone and make lots and lots of money.

So in addition to having to make good decisions and do the right thing, people had to be aware that they could be sued and have to defend their actions in court.

What made perfect sense at the time might not sound as good when explained to a jury of 12 people hearing it for the first time. So too many organizations decided to take away any discretion when it came to interpreting and enforcing the rules.

There were pretty much always rules against bringing weapons to school, but zero tolerance defined things as weapons that were anything but weapons. Guns that fired nothing more lethal than water -- squirt guns -- could be banned for their potential to disrupt classes, but plastic toy guns were nothing more than, well, toys.

As for discretion?

Forget it.

A classic case in Orange County, California, in the early '90s went far beyond stupidity. A little boy in first grade was waiting for the school bus one morning when he saw a razor blade in the grass.

He was afraid someone would be cut by it, so he picked it up. When the bus came, he tried to give it to the driver. The driver refused it and told him to give it to his teacher when he got to school.

So the little boy got to school, told his teacher about the razor blade he had found and tried to give it to her. She took him to the principal's office and told the principal he had brought a weapon to school.

Zero tolerance?

Yep, zero tolerance. The principal expelled the little boy from school for bringing a weapon onto school grounds.

This was something of a cause celebre in California at the time. A year or so later, when I found myself involved in a similar case, I was glad to find people intelligent enough to show some flexibility.

My son was in second grade when we got a call from the principal of his school. I went in to talk to her, and she told me that my son had brought a knife to school that day. It wasn't a bowie knife, a switchblade or even a Swiss Army knife. It was a tiny little penknife from the Roy Rogers Museum, with a blade small enough and dull enough to make it less dangerous than a paper cut.

She said two third graders had been bullying my son on the playground. Rather than complain to a teacher, he had tried to deal with the problem himself. As he told me later, he had no intention of hurting anyone. He just though that if he showed them the little knife and threatened to scratch them with it, they would leave him alone.

Heck, he was 7.

The principal asked me what thought. I told her I knew my son would never intentionally hurt anyone, but that I certainly understood that he couldn't be bringing weapons -- no matter how innocuous -- to school.

She seemed relieved to hear that. She told me she didn't want to punish my son, who was a good student and no trouble to his teacher at all. School district regulations said she should expel him, and she said if I had given the normal parent reaction ("It can't be my kid's fault!"), she would have.

But since I understood the situation and her reaction to it, she said I should just take him home for the rest of the day and he could come back to school the next day.

I thanked her for her kindness.

There's zero tolerance ... and zero tolerance.