Bad News

cerulean

cerulean

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May 26, 1999
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"Mitchell honor student suspended

By Erin Randolph/The Gazette
Story editor Valerie Wigglesworth; headline by Jeanne Davant

A Mitchell High School honor student was suspended Friday for three days after a random drug and weapons search turned up a pocket knife in the first-aid kit in her car.
Sonya Golden, 17, who was selected earlier this year as one of the Mayor's 100 Teens for her leadership skills, doesn't believe she did anything wrong, but she understands the district's policy to suspend anyone found with a weapon...

Colorado Springs School District 11 has a zero-tolerance policy on weapons that requires suspension or expulsion for any violation...

Student suspensions and expulsions have come under scrutiny in recent years. Policies can help keep drugs and weapons out of schools, but some people believe there must be room for exceptions.

Colorado lawmakers entered the debate during their 1998 session and gave school districts some discretion...

The law was prompted after a Longmont charter school expelled a 10-year-old girl when she turned in a steak knife she found in her lunch box. The girl had mistakenly grabbed her mother's lunch, which contained the knife...

Golden was pulled out of Advanced Placement English class Friday and asked if her car could be searched...

She gave officials permission to search her car. But the high school senior had forgotten about the pocket knife in the first-aid kit she and her mother had prepared together. They put the 21/2-inch knife in the kit in case they ever needed it for camping or an emergency and stored the kit in her glove compartment...

The three-day suspension means Golden will have to miss the Care & Share Thanksgiving food drive that she was helping to run. Golden is also the president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, vice president of the National Honor Society and a member of the swimming and golf teams."

- I edited the above story for length. You can see the full version of it at... http://www.gazette.com/archive/99-11-20/daily/top1.html

The story has been discussed on Denver talk radio and everyone who called in thought it was wrong to suspend the girl.




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Cerulean
Denver, CO


 
I understand the need for security measures after the cluster of school shootings around the country, but there needs to be simple common sense applied in these cases. When was the last time a simple pocketknife in a first-aid kit was used to commit a massacre?

It just seems a lot of the time they are suspending the wrong people. I realize laws must apply to everyone, but in a case like this, they need to look at the object, the intent, and the person.

These types of knee-jerk reactions are dangerous to everyone, because soon any citizen could be stopped on the street and arrested for carrying a 2" non-locking penknife in their pocket.
Jim
 
Any more of these silly suspensions made public and I'm sure there will be a backlash. Or a lawsuit. Or both.

------------------
"A knifeless man is a lifeless man"
-Nordic proverb
 
I have just read an article about lawyers in US. Interesting reading: USA population makes 5% of the world's population but 70% of lawyers are Americans.

They have to survive somehow (either accusing or defending other people) - so do not be surprised by some ridiculous and unbelievable cases.

By now I am sure you are not.

David

PS: My vocabulary is not good enough (and I do not want to be banned on this forum either) to describe people who passed such a ...Insert what you feel appropriate... law and those who actually impose it. They must be really a$$....s or something very similar.



[This message has been edited by David1967 (edited 23 November 1999).]
 
i always have a 12" bowie with me in my car.. it absolutly legal... but i would understand the concern about such a big knife in someones first aid kit (how would this person help me in an emergency
smile.gif
)... but what's so bad about a pocket knife?
 
I want to know who was the one who searched her car and turned her in. I find it hard to believe that that person could report her without feeling like an a$$.
 
This is completely ridiculous! How can someone live in a society with crazy laws like that? What next? Will you be arrested for having a sharpened pencil? Or maybe they will chop off the hands of someone with martial arts training?
Do something! Unite! Vote against politicians which are making such laws! Try to get someone into politics, who supports the knife community, even if it is just locally!

Achim
 
I'm with you General. There's always more to a story than what's reported; the way this has been presented however, would lead me to believe that someone had probable cause to search the car. Sure, we had locker searches at random every now and again back in the day, but never car searches. That mess wouldn't have flown too well in my town where parents still had some semblance of influence and power, and most importantly a voice in education politricks.

There seems to be a missing element to the story somehow. Like, the young lady's brother had recently dispatched seven police officers with a red-handled Swiss army knife, or something to this effect.

I'll also agree with the fact that another episode or two like this (senseless punishment by schools) will run the education ship further amuck.
 
I'd wonder about a first aid kit that DIDN'T have a nice sharp knife in it.

Idiotic, absolutely idiotic exercise of petty power by a petty person.


------------------
"..it is foolishness and endless trouble to cast a
stone at every dog that barks at you.."
 
So those six punks who assaulted a kid at a football game shouldn't get suspended, but a active christian athlete and National Honor Society member should? I think Jesse Jackson and the rest of the country need to get their sh*t straight.
 
In bygone days- 30+ years ago:
>I took an auto knife to show-and-tell (I found it while fishing with my grandfather)
>I carried a pocket knife every day to school and everywhere else.
>In high school, some of us hunted before school and left our guns in our cars during school so we could hunt after. The principal even tolerated tardiness if the hunting was good and the grades didn't suffer.
 
In bygone days- 30+ years ago:
>I took an auto knife to show-and-tell (I found it while fishing with my grandfather)
>I carried a pocket knife every day to school and everywhere else.
>In high school, some of us hunted before school and left our guns in our cars during school so we could hunt after. The principal even tolerated tardiness if the hunting was good and the grades didn't suffer.
Question: Where is all this silliness leading us??
 
The dog used to do the searches apparently detected the presence of alcohol in the car from a previous owner who was involved in an alcohol related accident with the car. This triggered the vehicle search.

The school policy is against weapons. A small (2 1/2 inch) folding knife in a toolkit or first aid kit is not a weapon. The school administrator(s) are idiots and should be chastised verbally and perhaps legally for this idiocy. There is a complete lack of common sense being displayed here. Zero tolerance for weapons is not what is being shown.

I guess they just don't get it, do they?
frown.gif
 
I hate to say it but...now you know why we have lawyers. If it was me, I would file a lawsuit. So-called "zero tolerance" is just plain stupid. We used to believe in common sense in this country. What the hell ever happened to that?

When I was a kid, we carried our rifles to school and put them in a locker. We had gun safety classes after school.

EVERY kid had a pocket knife in the rural school I attended. Never once saw a kid threaten another with a knife.

Maybe we should ban baseball bats from schools. They look like very nasty weapons to me. Common sense? Sheesh. Zero tolerance is for brave new worlds. Save it for the new millennium, after I'm dead and gone.



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Hoodoo

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
Let me just say that the girl is an idiot.
frown.gif


Not because she had a knife in her first aid kit though. If you go to the full story, you get this disturbing quote from the suspended girl:

"Sometimes innocent people have to be punished, so something like Columbine doesn't happen again," Golden said, referring to the massacre in April near Littleton that left 15 dead.

Despite recognizing the fact that she is innocent, she thinks it's OK for the school to suspend her!!!!!

You never know, she might get into a fight in the locker room with another girl in gym class, sneak out of the building, run to her car, unlock the door, fish thru the kit for the knife, and run back into the locker room and "go Columbine" on everyone in the locker room.

What's next? "Sure, I'll wear that little star."

And furthering my belief that stupidity is hereditary, a quote from her mother:

"What the school did was right," said her mother, Tamara Golden. "I would rather have her be suspended for three days than have her go to school and get shot in the face because they did not check anyone."

ick.

 
I hope nobody at that school has a screw driver in their tool kit in the trunk, and the guys that work at the local grocery store after school should probably leave their box cutters at work. I also think they should lock up all baseball bats except when stepping up to the plate.

Mark

------------------
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with
confidence.


 
Tom,

Thank you for posting those quotes. I did not have the chance to read the story in it's entirety but I must say I am distressed.
"Stupidity" seems an adequate word. I mean come on this is a 2 1/2 inch pocket knife, not an Uzi assault rifle.
"You want to search my car, sure....If you have probable cause and a search warrant, otherwise take a flying leap pal"

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The bible is not such a book a man would write if he could, or could write if he would.

*Lewis S. Chafer

2 Tim 3:16
 
We can argue the merit of such rules and laws, but, for the moment, we have to live with them.

Many of us carry one or more knives in our cars. Many of us have children who attend schools and who are licensed drivers. From time to time, one of those children might have to borrow dad's car. A possible destination is the school. Without even thinking about it, your child could, like the child who grabbed the wrong lunch, inadvertently end up with your knife at school and suffer for that mistake.



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Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.4cs.net/~gollnick
 
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