Zero Tolerance for Teens

By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet. Posted July 1, 2003.

High school students interviewed across the country are saying the same thing: "They're making schools like prisons." And it's not hard to see their point. Most U.S. high school students will have to walk by numerous hidden security cameras, outdoors and indoors, and go through an institutional-size metal detector manned by guards just to get into school each morning. Once there, students are subject to random searches of their bodies and belongings. Lockers can be searched without warning with or without the student present, and in many places police will use drug-sniffing dogs during raids where they search lockers and even students' parked cars.

“It violates us,” said Charita Ford, 16, editor –in-chief of Gumbo Magazine, a youth-run publication, in Milwaukee. “Some days you’ll come to school and they’ll just be like, ‘Take your purse off, your jacket, your backpack,’ and search everything.”

“I can see why they needed the security, but personally I hated it,” said Crystal Medina, 20, of her days at Lane Tech High School in Chicago. “I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but they treat you like you are. And they don’t search everybody, so it’s like profiling who they pick to search.”

Sometimes the searches are done by school staff or hired guards, other times by local police. Usually the contraband found hardly justifies the expenditure of resources.

“They usually only found cell phones and pagers, never guns, maybe a few drugs here and there,” said Medina.

A January 31 editorial in the Buccaneer Bulletin high school paper at Oswego High School in Oswego, New York described one such search at nearby Altmar-Parish-Williamstown High School:

"On November 22, students at the APW High School were surprised when several police squads and their drug-sniffing canine units entered the building for a thorough search of students' lockers," says the story. "It was an investigation that took place upon the principal's request, and resulted in only one major finding, a small amount of marijuana and a marijuana pipe in a student's pocket."

But since the institution of strict zero tolerance policies at schools around the country over the past decade, students are regularly suspended or even expelled for offenses that range from the relatively minor like minimal marijuana possession to the truly ridiculous -- like possession of a dull table knife to cut a grapefruit at lunch, or taking Tylenol for a headache.

Among many "Zero Tolerance Nightmares" posted on a website of the same name, students described being suspended or expelled for things such as asking too many questions about Sept. 11 or possessing a pocket knife used to fix a car mirror. In many states, schools are also extending zero tolerance policies to off-campus behavior, including minor drug possession or under-age drinking.

In many ways zero tolerance policies and extensive security and search measures create a vicious circle which exacerbates disruptive and destructive behavior by students. Suspensions and expulsions clearly have a negative effect on individual student's lives, disrupting or even effectively terminating their education with little positive benefit.

And students describe feeling humiliated and violated by locker, car and body searches, emotions that can only decrease their enthusiasm for school and their respect for school authorities. In a lawsuit filed with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in June 2001, students at Locke High School in South Central Los Angeles described being frisked and spread-eagled and having their personal belongings examined in front of whole classes. The ACLU noted that the school was breaking the law by conducting the searches without a metal detector; touch-searches are only supposed to be done sparingly after a metal detector has gone off.

"The searches are embarrassing," Toi Benford, a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. "They're treating us like we're criminals. It's turning school into a prison."

Like high schools across the country, Locke also has a high number of security cameras all over campus, though students and staff say the cameras do little to change conditions.

"There are 27 cameras on the second floor alone and they are going to put up more cameras to supposedly make it a safer place, when really you feel more like a criminal," former student Rosa Cuevas told a Locke student journalist last year.

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