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Administrators have also begun to show zero tolerance for things students merely say or write. Call it subzero tolerance. Last spring Antonius Brown, 18, wrote a story in his journal about a deranged student who goes on a rampage at Brown's high school, Therrell, in Atlanta. It's a sick story. Eventually officials heard about it and suspended him for 20 days. But Brown happened to return from that suspension on April 20, the day of the Columbine massacre. He was expelled two days later in the fearful atmosphere of the moment. Police charged him with making terrorist threats. Brown spent three days in jail, and then a municipal judge ordered him to leave town for two months.
School officials defended their actions by noting that Brown, like the Columbine shooters, had been teased. Although the judge decided in August that Brown's journal entries did not constitute a threat, he also found that Brown had made threatening remarks, such as a promise to "mess with" the Class of '99. But if Brown needed help, he didn't exactly get it. Prosecutors are still weighing a case against him, and Brown has had to switch schools. Zero tolerance is "an easy way to get rid of troubled students," says John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, a civil-liberties group best known for representing Paula Jones and now helping the soap boys. "But we don't deal with their real problems."
When does flirting become a real problem? Ask MeShelle Locke, 16, of Lacey, Wash. On Nov. 5, she was kidding around with a boy in English class at North Thurston High. He made some wisecrack to the teacher, and Locke looked at him, made a gun with her thumb and index finger, and said, "Bang." The boy, whom she often joked with, wondered if it was a threat. "No," MeShelle said lightly, "it's a promise."
You would have thought she had pulled a .357 Magnum. Some girls confronted her about the "incident," and an exasperated Locke made the same dumb threatening gesture to them. The next school day, she was met by a police officer, who read Miranda rights to her (but didn't arrest her). Then she was expelled. "It's not happening," she thought. Locke's parents got involved, and she returned after a four-day suspension.
Kids can bargain with school officials, but have virtually no First or Fourth Amendment rights (guaranteeing basic civil liberties and preventing undue searches). Unless they can invoke a special circumstance, such as a mental disability, kids often have thin grounds on which to base a defense against school punishment. That's because the U.S. Supreme Court has eroded student protections granted in the 1960s. In 1995 Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a caustic decision allowing drug testing of students. "Minors," he said, "lack some of the most fundamental rights of self-determination--including even the right of liberty in its narrow sense, i.e., the right to come and go at will." The ruling was widely seen to give administrators carte blanche in punishing students, though schools still must follow some weak due-process guidelines.