In the Crosshairs: Killing Creativity in a Nevada School District

With little more than two months left before school's end, what could have possessed 16-year-old Zoe Kohen Ley to do it?

As police scoured her locker for guns, she begged for mercy. She cried as a school administrator tore personal notes, evidence, from her journal.

But some, including her teacher, would say she should have known better. Did she really think she'd get away with writing about such dangerous ideas in school?

Zoe tried to answer that question in Clark County (Nevada) District Court two weeks ago before Judge Lee Gates: "It was creative writing class!"

Maybe, in some fairytale past, students might have been free to write what Zoe wrote in Miss Ell's creative writing class. Especially students in a school like Las Vegas Academy, which is designed to accommodate more creative, artistically minded students.

Then again, that was before Columbine. That was before the state of Nevada legislated "zero tolerance" in our schools. And that was long before the school district started applying its expulsion policy not only to students who commit violence, but to those -- like Zoe -- who dare to even write about it in a creative writing class.

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	"Instead of educating our kids to be critical thinkers, creative minds, and to have faith in the values of free speech, we may well be training a generation of fearful, overly cautious, emotionally pent-up and intellectually stagnant drones."

America will likely never fully recover from the terror of Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold and the 13 people they slaughtered at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Lawmakers reacted swiftly.

In Carson City, in May 1999, the Nevada Legislature did their part by enacting a little-known and virtually unreported bill that made it incredibly easy for schools to get rid of students. Signed by Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, the new law allows schools to label students as "habitual disciplinary problems" if they have "threatened or extorted, or attempted to threaten or extort, another pupil or (school employee)" in a year's time.

And any student labeled a "habitual disciplinary problem" must be expelled immediately from school for at least one semester. There's no leeway.

On the heels of that, Clark County schools began talking more stridently about having "zero tolerance" for, well, just about anything that might disrupt school life.

While everyone can imagine and appreciate the need for such laws in relation to actual school violence, drugs or crime, little thought seemed to have been spent on the potential for abuse or misuse of these laws and policies. With "habitual disciplinary problems" defined so broadly, for instance, there seems to be a high probability that even those students with virtually no disciplinary background, no history of violence, and no violent intents could be rounded up with the others and thrown out.

Las Vegas' Allen Lichtenstein, attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, has a name for zero-tolerance policies that he believes are behind the whittling away of students' First Amendment rights. It's a cop-out by school administrators, he says, and it's costing us our civil liberties and the promise of free-thinking students.

When Zoe was kicked out of school in March for something she wrote in creative writing class, she was cited as an "habitual disciplinary problem." She'd never been in trouble before.

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On Zoe's last day in class, "Miss Ell," as students called the creative writing teacher, gave them an assignment: During the course of the class, write a dramatic scene based on one of several aphorisms, or sayings. Then Miss Ell read the sayings aloud. Zoe latched immediately onto the phrase, "better late than never," which had been the story of her life over the last year. Suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome -- a debilitating disease that effects some 1 million Americans with headaches, constant flu-like symptoms and fatigue -- Zoe had missed a lot of school. Miss Ell testified that Zoe missed 15 of 34 creative writing classes last semester. She was late for others. And Miss Ell didn't like it one bit.