School turning students into outcasts

Article here. Excerpt:

'Former Chief Judge of New York State Judith S. Kaye always makes necessary sense, as she did when she recently wrote this in the opinion pages of The New York Times:

“As universal pre-K and the Common Core standards dominate the headlines, we cannot overlook a third subject that deserves top billing: keeping children in school and out of courts” (Letters, The New York Times, Feb. 22).

Kaye was writing in response to an op-ed that had run in the Times last month. In it, Robert K. Ross and Kenneth H. Zimmerman, the respective heads of the California Endowment and the United States programs for the Open Society Foundations, wrote: “Large numbers of students are kicked out, typically for nonviolent offenses, and suspensions have become the go-to response for even minor misbehavior, like carrying a plastic water gun to elementary school ...
...
At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., 10-year-old “fifth-grader Johnny Jones asked his teacher for a pencil during class. Jones walked to the front of the classroom to retrieve the pencil, and during his walk back to his seat, a classmate and friend of Johnny’s held his folder like an imaginary gun and ‘shot’ at Johnny.

“Johnny playfully used his hands to draw the bowstrings on a completely imaginary ‘bow’ and ‘shot’ an arrow back.
...
The school’s code of conduct required Principal John Horton to “contact the appropriate police department, complete an incident report to file with the school superintendent and begin the process of mandatory expulsion immediately.”

Added Rutherford senior staff attorney Douglas R. McKusick in a Dec. 4, 2013, letter to South Eastern School District Superintendent Rona Kaufmann: “Johnny’s rights were trampled without the due consideration. He was immediately threatened with expulsion, and thereafter summarily suspended without adequate justification ....”'