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| DRAWING THE LINE | |
 November 16, 1999 
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Zero-tolerance discipline policies are growing in popularily across the country. Following this background report, Gwen Ifill discusses zero-tolerance with two school administrators, a teacher and a guidance counselor.
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 GWEN
IFILL: It all started as a ruckus between high school students at a September
football game. But on home video, the fight looked more like a riot. Students
were expelled. Parents were outraged. That school fight has now become
the backdrop for a national debate over rules, race and zero tolerance.
Decatur, Ill., is a small city of about 83,000, three hours southwest
of Chicago. Today, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson literally stopped
traffic there.
GWEN IFILL: Similar, if less heated, disputes are playing themselves out in schools across the country, where officials are taking decisive action to respond to violence and threats of violence within their walls. Last month, a Texas teenager spent five days in jail for writing a Halloween story. REPORTER: How do you feel getting out of here, Chris? TEENAGER: Wonderful.
MAYOR MICHAEL WHITE, Cleveland: (Last Month) Now we have documents in our possession that seem to clearly indicate that there was planning under way for some sort of violent act. GWEN IFILL: Authorities arrested four students and suspended 11, citing evidence that the teenagers -- all of them white -- were plotting a racist attack at the predominantly black school. Tensions at the nation's schools have run especially high since last spring's Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. Early last month, a Columbine student was arrested for threatening to "finish the job."
But a U.S. Department of Education report suggests that the problem may not actually be as bad as it seems. Overall, the report found, school violence has declined. Zero-tolerance policies, however, are spreading. And if today's old-fashioned civil rights protest in Decatur is any guide, some parents are not willing to take that lying down. |
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REV.
JESSE JACKSON: We were told in Selma, Ala., that the right to vote was
local. We were told in South Africa that the right to apartheid was
local. And so the local is in a state and the state in a nation. We
respect the United States, and we will go with every level because we
want due process and equal protection under the law for all of our citizens.
GWEN
IFILL: He was later arrested and led away in handcuffs after leading
a protest against the expulsions. School officials have said all along
they had no choice; Decatur school board policy dictated they expel
six students involved in the fight. Four were later charged with mob
action, which is considered a felony. 
KENNETH
ARNDT, Superintendent, Decatur Schools: This was not a simple fistfight,
this truly was a major brawl. They had no conscience regarding who they
were going to run into or move out of the way. 
GWEN
IFILL: The extra credit assignment described the shooting of two classmates
and a teacher. And in Cleveland, Ohio, earlier this month, South High
School's big homecoming weekend was ruined and the school shut down.
It
seems as if it's happening everywhere: In Prairie Grove, Ark., five
junior high students who called themselves the "prep killers"
were arrested. And in Oklahoma City last week, a 4-year-old took his
parents' loaded pistol to school, thinking it was a toy. He was kicked
out of school for a year.