 
|
|
              
|
 Expulsion part
of solution By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer The sixth-grader from Fox Chapel had a pocketknife and an attitude. In a moment of anger or stupidity, the boy threatened classmates at Dorseyville Middle School. Fox Chapel's school board reacted decisively, expelling him last May for all of the coming school year. Now the boy will attend a private school, and the same school district that wouldn't have him will pay his tuition. The taxpayers' bill for the boy's new school will be $60 a day, or about $11,000 for the academic year, said Fox Chapel Superintendent Alan Fager, who declined to name the school. ''Kids make mistakes,'' Fager said in defense of the arrangement. ''We want him to get a good education.'' The Fox Chapel case illustrates the difficulty of expelling children from school, something that is happening more than ever in Pennsylvania because of rigid rules against weapons, fighting and drugs. Even as the punishment is applauded by one safety-conscious town, the troublemaker is usually headed somewhere else -- often at taxpayers' expense. Two state laws account for this. Pennsylvania's Safe Schools Act mandates expulsion of students who bring weapons to school. But another state law requires children younger than 17 to attend school. In addition, these students are entitled to a publicly financed education. Administrators say expulsions -- which can range in length from 11 days to more than a year -- are a necessary tool to keep schools safe. But, they added, expulsions do not solve every problem. ''We need to help children be successful, not discard them,'' said Barbara Ferrier, acting superintendent of Hempfield Area School District. ''If they're not successful, ultimately that's going to be a problem for society.'' Ferrier and her board expelled a wave of students last spring following an LSD scandal at Hempfield Area High School. She would not discuss specifics, but school board President Anthony Bompiani said more than a half-dozen students were thrown out. The trouble at Hempfield became known when honor-roll senior Nicholas C. Marinos was arrested for selling 19 doses of LSD to classmates. Marinos, who was among those expelled, completed his high school degree anyway. ''He had gotten so far in the program that he had what was needed to fulfill requirements for the Hempfield diploma,'' Ferrier said. Most public districts will not accept a student who has been expelled elsewhere. But tutoring programs and alternative and private schools make graduation a practical goal for students who have had serious disciplinary problems. Marinos, for instance, was able to complete what little work he needed for his diploma at home after a judge placed him on probation. Bompiani said he wanted the rest of the students in the LSD case to finish high school, too, so they could get their lives on track. He said the board would even consider re-admitting them to Hempfield if they made progress at alternative schools and complied with court-ordered requirements, such as drug counseling. ''I'm expecting that to happen because I have total faith in the kids we have, and total faith that their families will get the problems straightened out,'' Bompiani said. ''Once you're involved in one of these situations, you realize that these are children who need help. Our job is to help them.'' But, after a year that saw school shootings in Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oregon and Pennsylvania, politicians and many administrators are becoming less tolerant of children who break the law. ''Students who commit crimes in our schools deserve to be punished,'' said Gov. Ridge. ''We must send an unmistakable signal that youth will never be accepted as an excuse for violence.'' Ridge's law-and-order stance makes sense to most Pennsylvania school administrators. They removed a total of 2,061 students from regular classrooms and sent them to alternative schools in the 1996-97 school year, the most recent for which statistics are available. That was an increase of about 68 percent from the year before -- hard evidence that tolerance levels for bad behavior are declining. In all, 34,569 violence and weapons cases were reported in the state's public schools in 1996-97, a jump of 9.4 percent over the previous year. The state's two largest districts, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, skewed the figures by reporting their cases incorrectly. Philadelphia failed to list violence that did not involve weapons. Pittsburgh actually overstated its problems by compiling statistics differently from the rest of the districts. Even when accounting for such glitches, school administrators said, weapons and violence are too much a part of today's schools. Many now promise to be ironhanded in combatting them. ''We're not going to consider anything an adolescent prank anymore,'' said William Pettigrew, superintendent of the Mars Area School District in Butler County. Pettigrew was entangled in a case last spring in which two seventh-grade boys compiled a list of teachers they wanted to kill. Once caught, the boys said they had only been fooling around. Pettigrew's administration -- nervous because the episode occurred about the time two boys killed a teacher and four girls at a Jonesboro, Ark., school -- recommended expulsion. But the school board opted for suspensions, a decision that brought criticism from residents and teachers who said the district needed to take a tougher stand. This year, Pettigrew said, even half-baked pubescent threats will be met with severe consequences. ''We've reached our point of departure where we're taking a hardball stance,'' he said. The McGuffey School Board in rural Washington County already has adopted that attitude. It expelled four students one night last spring. Three of them had threatened teachers. Their expulsions may be lifted after they complete anger-control programs and spend six weeks in a county alternative school the district helps to finance. The fourth student, who brought a toy gun to high school, was expelled for the 1998-99 school year. He also has been offered placement in the alternative school at taxpayers' expense. Anthony Pascarella, assistant principal of McGuffey High, said school boards have to be willing to take the heat that comes with expelling students. ''When I was in school, you never really worried about violence, but our society today is such that we have to be concerned,'' said Pascarella, whose most notable discipline case was confiscating a hand grenade from a student. In cases of violence, weapons or threats, Pascarella said, schools should treat every student the same. ''That means a no-tolerance policy.'' One parent, Paul Heins, said he doesn't like zero-tolerance policies because they can turn administrators into unreasonable robots. Heins' daughter, Hilary, was nearly expelled from Pleasant Valley Middle School in Monroe County after she brought a butter knife to school. Hilary, in a rush one morning to catch the bus and lacking lunch money, tossed her piggy bank and the butter knife into her knapsack. She planned to pry open her bank at lunch time. But when she got to her school, located in a booming neighborhood at the base of the Pocono Mountains, newly installed metal detectors sounded off. Hilary's butter knife had landed her in big trouble. Administrators suspended her for 10 days. When her parents fought the punishment as excessive, one board member suggested that expulsion might be a more appropriate penalty. The butter knife was among the 4,533 cases of weapons possession listed in the state's latest school violence report. Hilary's father is still angry that she was suspended. ''Rules need to be written with room for discretion, with room to use your intelligence,'' Paul Heins said. ''What worries me is that, once a rule is in place, nobody is willing to say that he might have made a mistake.'' Next: When the homeroom is parked outside in the schoolyard
|
