When Zero Tolerance Intersects with the Virtual Classroom

A case from Gwinnett County, Georgia, illustrates one of the unanticipated problems of virtual schooling. A middle-school student was suspended for using racist and threatening language during a Zoom class. He appealed, arguing that the school‘s IT department had bad information in the logs and wrongly identified him as the perpetrator. The county Board upheld the suspension, so the next appeal will be to the state Board of Educaiton. The news article has only one side of the story, so it is impossible to know what information the school has, but the child’s evidence seems to be compelling.

One question I have is why the school decided on a 3-month suspension rather than a more reasonable time frame. The article doesn’t identify the “racist” language, so it’s hard to tell whether the school characterized it accurately. The violent language consisted of threats to murder and rape people in the class. That information sounds like the school may be acting under a “zero tolerance” policy, which tend to have inflexible and draconian applications.

Most zero tolerance policies appear to have been designed by lawyers rather than by anyone who knows anything about child development. Zero tolerance policies protect institutions from lawsuits; they do not protect children from harm. Children often say stupid things, which is why we accept the responsibility to teach them. They also often make statements that sound frightening to adult ears, but the children lack the life experience to know their import. Children, for example, “kill“ bad guys during their pretend play, but have no idea what “killing” means in real life. Holding them responsible for words that they do not understand and do not mean in the way that adults hear them runs counter to our job to teach children before we discipline them. No one is well-served by policies that treat childish mistakes with strict intolerance.