As if we needed another example of how zero-tolerance policies regarding weapons at schools can make for messy situations, The Kansas City Star has an eyebrow-raising story today about Lincoln College Prep sophomore Ana Morales, who was caught bringing a knife to school and then suspended and exiled permanently.
Make no mistake, this is not a "girl has a butter knife in her locker" tale. Morales brought a rainbow-colored knife that had a switchblade-style spring on it. She tells the paper that she couldn't get the release mechanism to work, so she pulled the blade out like one would with a pocketknife. And she admits that that it was dumb to keep the damn thing in her bag in the first place.
But Morales, the paper writes, was far from a troubled student
brandishing a weapon at classmates. After getting accepted into the
castlelike school, based on test scores, she carried a 3.63 GPA and aspirations of going to art school before a
substitute teacher saw the knife. She was given a 10-day suspension,
and citing the Missouri Safe School Act, the district decided to bounce
her for a full year. Superintendent John Covington overturned the ban and said the 10-day suspension would stand and that Morales would
be sent to Northeast High School.
Maybe the school district is looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it's a
teachable moment for them. Morales tells The Star that she took the
knife out of her bag to show her friends while they were discussing how
much contraband gets past the school's metal detectors. So, in a way,
she could have been doing the district a favor by pointing out a
weakness in their security. Right? Kinda like in The Social Network,
when Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg hacks into dorm websites and then tells a
Harvard disciplinary committee that he deserves recognition for exposing
the school's network security issues. OK, probably not.
This seems to
be a case of learning that "Don't bring knives to
school" really does mean "Don't bring knives to school."
And the whole thing seems to have put Morales off school altogether. She
tells the paper that she's going to get a GED and go to community college and
then art school rather than leave Lincoln for a new school. Is
Northeast High School really that bad?
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I'm so disgusted with Covington I don't even know where to start. His treatment of the young lady in this instance is consistent with how he approached the community in general.
Now the district loses one more high testing child, she loses her shot at a competitive college, and sends a signal to parents to start looking for ways to get their children out of the district.
He had 17,000 students at the beginning of the year. He had 16,000 at the start of spring semester. I grade him an "F". Maybe he should be reminded that Kansas City is not a high security prison, and he is not the warden.
Frankly, based on his poor performance, he's not a superintendent either.
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